MURD 201: Syllabus
by Haven126
Summary: MacGyver finds himself an unwilling student attending an evening lecture, and each class assignment may cost him the life of someone he loves.
1. Chapter 1

Standard disclaimers apply. I don't own any of these characters, please don't sue. Kyser and Simmons belong to **Alyssa Blackbourn** and are used with permission.

 **Content Warning** : Graphic violence, torture, and horror themes.

 **Additional Content Warning** : I wanted to see if I could write something that would make a reader's skin crawl. If you don't enjoy horror movies, or if you get squicked easily, this is not the story for you.

Many thanks to **Alyssa Blackbourn** , co-plotter, editor, and soon to be co-author, if she ever gets around to finishing her current super fun projects. While this is a one-shot, and not in the Turkey Day or Revenge universes, you can expect to see some of the fallout covered in later fics.

-M-

Mac finished handing off the bag and turned back to the truck, surprised to see Jack Dalton grinning at him from the other side of the flatbed.

He gave his partner a quizzical look, sliding the next bag of mulch off the stack, and then returned the smile. "What?"

The grin broke out into a chuckle. "Nothin'. Just noticin' you getting checked out, that's all."

MacGyver let the bag of mulch slide over the side of the truck into his arms, turning, and the next person in their little assembly line, a twenty-something graduate student from UCLA with curly brown locks and a cute dimple, took it from him with a smile.

Once he was sure she had it, he turned back, and Jack was still grinning at him.

He shook his head. "Jack, we are not here to pick up the volunteers –"

But his partner's grin didn't slip. "Oh, I wasn't talkin' about dimples there, chief." His eyes slid over Mac's right shoulder, and after staring at his partner another moment, Mac reached over to pull down the highest bag of mulch from the next stack, using it as an excuse to glance over his shoulder.

A sandy blond, with hair even lighter than his, was standing about twenty feet away with one foot on a shovel, wiping at a little sweat. And using the motion as an excuse to look at him.

Their eyes met, and Mac nodded to the other man, then finished tugging the bag of mulch down from the stack.

Jack was still grinning when Mac turned back to him. "Told ya."

He suppressed a chuckle and handed off the next bag. "Yeah, well, I hope not."

"Oh? Attention from the same sex makes ya uncomfortable?" Jack gave him a mock surprised look. "I thought you millennials were more cosmopolitan than that."

Mac shrugged. "Not at all. But seeing as the guy bringing that tree over's his boyfriend, I'd hate to be the start of an argument."

It was his turn to grin as he watched his partner glance past him again, assessing for himself.

"And frankly, if one of us was going to be uncomfortable, I figure it'd be you." He tossed the bag of mulch over his shoulder, then helped himself to another. "As I recall, you weren't terribly fond of that scene with Silva and Bond in Skyfall."

"Now you know full well my list of problems with Skyfall." Jack had also grabbed a couple bags of mulch, and Mac started walking. Jack kept pace with him, so they emerged around the front of the truck at the same time. "Silva's whole plan was garbage from the get-go. Patrice just happened to have his Macao casino chip on him when he gets killed, Bond goes straight there, because of course that's the best lead, then Silva had to just –"

"Aaand I started an argument anyway," Mac muttered to himself, shifting one of the bags of mulch a little higher on his shoulder.

Honestly, it was just too beautiful a day to fight. Which was why he was glad they weren't; today the Phoenix Foundation was exercising its charitable arm and co-sponsoring 200K Tree Day, a day where volunteers from all over the LA area got together and planted two hundred thousand trees native to southern California. About seventy volunteers had shown up at the park, and not thirty feet away Mac could see Riley tossing a clod of dirt at Bozer as he retreated with an empty bag of mushroom compost.

"-and besides, I've had this handsome mug a long time," Jack finished, depositing his two bags next to a stake that had been marked, but not yet dug. "That don't bother me none."

Mac nodded his agreement, approaching the blond and his companion. They were both in their early thirties, obvious gym buffs, and the blond's dark-haired cohort was holding the six foot tree straight while his partner filled in the hole.

"Here you go," he greeted them, dumping the two bags of mulch, and the dark-haired man nodded his thanks. "Can I grab that shovel when you're done?"

". . . just . . . about." The blond man tamped down the dirt around the tree vigorously, and Mac was impressed to see that his hiking boots looked like they'd legitimately been used for hiking. A lot of folks in the city liked to wear ruggedized gear for the look, as opposed to the functionality, but these guys looked like the real deal.

The shovel handle was passed over, and Mac accepted the tool, grabbing the next nearest site. Jill had done all the calculations on the best spread and combinations of trees to plant by the trees' full grown size and canopy, and they'd come out quite early in the morning to mark everything off. It had made what could have been a real zoo into a very neat and orderly day of saving the planet, one carbon fixer at a time.

Mac eyeballed the correct diameter of the circle needed to plant a five foot _Quercus engelmanni_ and set the shovel into the ground. He'd nearly gotten the hole dug before Jack finally huffed his way over with the tree, its root ball tied up neatly in burlap, and pulled a knife from his pocket, sawing through the twine.

"I think I should be offended," he declared as he straightened. "What on earth ever made you think that was a problem for me?"

The work gloves Phoenix had provided were doing a good job cutting down on callouses, but the exterior was a little rough as he dragged it across his forehead. It was a balmy sixty or so degrees, but it felt a lot hotter in the sun. "Nothing. I guess I just assumed . . ." He trailed off as the couple under discussion walked over, wadding up empty plastic bags of mulch.

"Are we recycling these?"

Mac nodded, and gestured towards the truck. "Yeah, just throw 'em in one of the two trash cans on the back. Those are for recycling. Thanks."

They were barely even out of earshot before Jack grabbed a half-full bag of compost, dumping some into the hole. "You just assumed?"

Mac shrugged, mixing a few shovel-fulls of dirt with the rich compost. "Texan, military background, jock-"

Jack was propping up the tree by its root ball, and he made a broad gesture around them. "Brother, I live in the land of fruits, nuts, and flakes."

And just a glance around the park confirmed that statement. While it was soul-warming to see so many volunteers out on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, and many of them had arrived in their Priuses and Leafs, Mac was beginning to think some of these people had never actually touched dirt before in their lives. Three of the college students had been munching on homemade brownie bites earlier and their pace had slowed dramatically in the forty minutes that followed. Now they were all flat on their backs, and if he wasn't mistaken, they were picking shapes out of clouds.

Except there weren't any clouds. The sky was a clear blue.

"I ain't talkin' about them." Jack had clearly followed his gaze. "But tell you what, betcha they eat their weight in rolls when we all call it a day and hit the Claim Jumper."

"Oh, is that where we're all headed after we finish up this year?" The voice had come from behind Jack.

"Yes sir," Jack confirmed, as the two men grabbed the next available stake, setting down a tree and more compost. The darker-haired one took the opportunity to pull deep forest DEET out of his cargo pants pocket and proceed to hose himself down like he was about to walk into a swarm of hungry female _Aedes aegypti_. His partner took a few steps forward, sputtering and waving the fumes away.

"I swear, he so much as sees a bug, and I have to call the fire department to come get him off the ceiling," the blond complained. "But, he comes out with me to volunteer every year."

Knowing that he was tying up the shovel, Mac made an appropriate dent and Jack hefted their tree, placing the root ball more or less in the right place.

"Angle it five degrees," Mac instructed, quickly filling in the hole with the displaced dirt and more compost.

"Dude, it's straight."

Even bent and shoveling dirt, Mac knew it wasn't. "Jack, angle the trunk another five degrees."

"He sounds like this one," the darker haired man laughed, and Mac clearly heard a retaliatory swat.

Then again, with a little distance, they at least should be able to see if it was straight or not. Mac glanced towards them, his eyebrows raised, and the darker haired of the two men seemed to understand what he was asking, because he held up a hand, and then he tilted it a little to his left.

Mac grinned and glanced at Jack, who growled something under his breath but made the adjustment, and then Mac stepped on the dirt to flatten it, handing off the shovel as the blond came forward.

"Thanks for the assist." Mac held out a gloved hand. "The name's MacGyver."

"Elliot," the blond said, shaking on it. "The instigator over there is Drew."

'The instigator' had a mildly innocent expression on his face, like he had no idea why Elliot might have said that, and Jack gave him a knowing look.

"Jack Dalton."

"Well, it's nice to meet you." Elliot took the shovel back to their stake as Mac tore into a bag of mulch and started spreading it. "You two work for one of the sponsors, right?"

"The Phoenix Foundation," Jack confirmed, grabbing the other bag of mulch. "What about you?"

The rest of the afternoon flew by. Mac was actually surprised when he finally climbed to his feet, letting Elliot dump the mulch around their newly planted oak, and saw that there wasn't another plot staked. He straightened his back, working out the kinks, and noticed Boze heading towards them with another bag of mulch.

"Think this about does it," Bozer told him, handing off the bag, and Mac traded him the shovel.

"Really?"

"Yep, this is the last one." His roomie brushed his hands off on his jeans, one at a time. "Now it's just clean-up, and off to delicious delicious steak." He glanced past Mac, to where Drew and Jack were standing off to the side, deep in serious conversation. "Uh . . . why isn't Jack helping?"

Mac didn't even bother to look. "Zombies," he said simply.

His roommate was quiet a moment. "Zombies," he repeated flatly.

Mac nodded tiredly and dumped the mulch, wadding up the plastic bag and accepting the other one from Elliot as the other man used his boot to nudge the mulch into a slightly neater circle.

"Do I want to know?" Bozer didn't sound like he wanted to know.

"Well, why wouldn't zombies naturally come up in conversation while planting trees on a beautiful March day in SoCal," Mac murmured, checking out the rest of the field. Most of the volunteers were already on cleanup, gathering the rest of the mulch and compost bags, and the stakes that had been used to mark the plots. Their group had had three hundred trees to plant, and thanks to Jill's spread, it looked like a dwarf tree forest instead of a tree nursery. "You know Jack."

"Well, Drew did _not_ help that situation," Elliot admitted, casting a look over his shoulder. "To be honest, I'm just happy he's found a new friend, and I don't have to listen to it."

Mac could definitely appreciate that. "Bozer, this is Elliot. Elliot, Bozer."

The two men nodded to one another, and Mac followed Bozer back towards the landscaping truck. His roomie shouldered the shovel, glancing back. "Hey, uh, Mac . . .?"

He fished some other wadded up plastic mulch bags out of his pocket. "Yes, and no." He meant it as the answers to Bozer's unasked questions, and his roommate correctly interpreted that and moved on to the third one.

"And . . . he's okay with his partner flirting with Jack?"

"Dude, I really don't know, and just a head's up, don't ask Jack about it unless you want to hurt his feelings."

Bozer gave him a strange look, putting the shovel on the back of the truck with the others while Mac levered himself up onto the bed.

"You know, I figured he'd be a little . . ." Bozer made an 'iffy' gesture.

"I know, right?" Somewhat mollified, Mac tossed the bags into the trash can, and accepted a few more that were offered up by another volunteer.

"Well, good for him."

"Good for all of us. Do you really want to get dragged into yet _another_ zombie apocalypse tabletop scenario?"

Unfortunately for him, he and Jack had carpooled, and twenty-seven minutes of the thirty minute trip to the Claim Jumper was spent summarizing the thirty-four minute conversation Jack had had with his new friend. As it turned out, they agreed on the freezing principle, meaning zombies wouldn't generate enough body heat to prevent themselves from freezing solid in sufficiently low temperatures, but apparently Drew also bought Mac's theory that whatever liquid was still in a zombie would be supersaturated with salts, meaning the freezing point would be lower than that of normal water.

Riley and Bozer had saved them seats, and Mac was relieved when the conversation turned to the college students who had brought along recreational desserts.

"Hey Mac, do you think zombies could get stoned?"

He was three quarters of the way through his steak, otherwise he wouldn't have paused to answer. "Well, the active ingredient in cannabis is tetrahydrocannabinol, or THC, and it acts on the-"

"No." Bozer's tone was final. "Think that through, Jack."

He'd already inhaled a steak and baked potato, and waved a neatly stabbed stalk of asparagus at the younger man. "I am. Can you image, like, usin' a fog machine on a bunch of zombies, calm 'em down like bee keepers calm down a hive-"

Mac smiled as he stepped it forward, and kept eating his steak.

"Yeah, Jack. And for an hour, I bet they'd be all chill, just pickin' lice off each other." Bozer fixed the agent with a look. "And what do you think would happen during hour two?"

Jack bit the asparagus stalk in half. "Well, then I guess they'd-" Then the smile slowly faded. "Oh. I see what you're puttin' down there, Boze."

"Uh-huh. Not like zombies are gonna knock over a 7-11 for cheesy poofs. They'd be looking for brainy poofs."

"Yeah, met two of those just today," Jack murmured, eating the rest of his asparagus. "Nice fellas. Wouldn't want to sic a bunch of zombies on 'em."

"So what, that's the end of the giant potsmoke cannon?" Riley sounded disappointed. "I think that idea's got merit. Come on, Mac, we need new weapons for the Korben Challenge, and you like non-lethal tech . . ."

"Well, marijuana has proven pain-blocking characteristics," he allowed. "That might calm wounded soldiers on the field-"

Jack looked at them both as if they'd lost their minds. "You ever seen someone high drivin' a car?"

Since they lived in LA, everyone at the table reluctantly nodded.

"Yeah. Now imagine they're drivin' a tank. Or usin' a rifle."

"Hey, I'm sure the purple ducks would deserve it."

Mac decided not to bring up the fact that there were several species of ducks with purple plumage, one endangered. However, the merits – and drawbacks – of marijuana use got them safely through the rest of the dinner. Mac would have killed for a beer, but he was driving and exhausted, and he knew if he'd had one, it would have been lights out.

By the time they stood, it had finally gotten dark, and while Matty was nowhere to be seen, there were still plenty of slightly dirty, very happy volunteers cleaning the place up. The Phoenix Foundation had rented the entire restaurant, a catered dinner as thank you to the volunteers, and Mac had heard enough from the other tables to know that they'd successfully met their goal. Teams across the city had managed to plant all their trees.

Even if the survival rate was only, say, 40%, that was still eighty thousand trees that would be growing at the end of the summer that hadn't been there before.

They'd been in nurseries in Nevada and Oregon -

Mac swatted his brain and slid into the driver's seat of the jeep, starting it up as Jack climbed in. "I am so glad you thought to grab that six pack yesterday."

"Yeah, I know, I'm awesome," Jack acknowledged, slipping his cellphone out of his back pocket and dropping it in a cupholder as Mac pulled out of the parking lot. "But what're you gonna drink?"

He smiled and shook his head, taking the least congested route home. He was in no mood to ruin a perfectly good day with traffic. "You know, I'm a little surprised you didn't wanna stay and have a drink with Drew."

Jack groaned. "Really?"

"Hey, we millennials don't judge," Mac reminded him. "You get his number?"

"At least he'd go to the range with me," Jack fired back good-naturedly. "For a gym bunny, that guy knew his weapons. Ex military, couldn't figure which branch though."

"Don't ask, don't tell, right?"

His partner snorted. "Dude, was that even still in execution by the time you joined up?"

He had to think about it a second. "Tail end. I enlisted in '09, I think that directive was still in effect until 2011."

"Damn." Jack was quiet a moment. "Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it?"

Considering all the experiences they'd packed into the years between his deployment and Phoenix, it seemed like another life. "I gotta say, it's nice to be tired at the end of the day and not have it caused by getting shot at or blown up." Of course, that happened almost as frequently now as it had back in Afghanistan and Iraq. These volunteering days Phoenix set up, they were hard work, but they were little slivers of a normal life, and they never failed to re-energize him. Being with normal people, working towards a common goal.

"I hear you, man." His partner stared out the window for a moment. "You know, it's gonna take Bozer at least twenty minutes to drop Riles off before he gets to your place, we could always make him pick us up another six pack and make it a movie night –"

"And leave Riley out? She'd kill us."

Jack made a sound that was curiously more like a growl than an agreement. "Pretty sure she has other plans."

Mac chanced a glance at the other agent. It was hard to tell if there was disapproval there. "And . . . these other plans are with . . . that guy she's been texting?"

There were no streetlights on Linbar, and the console was turned down low so the light didn't ruin Mac's night vision, but even in the dim green he could see Jack looking at him. "I didn't ask. And before you start on me again, I'm not withholding anything, I just haven't met this guy yet and-"

Mac took his foot off the accelerator as a bright yellow street bike came into view around the curve, just on the shoulder. It wasn't in the lane, but it was pretty close, and the rider waved his helmet. As they came fully around the curve in the road, Mac immediately slowed. "Isn't that –"

"Elliot," Jack finished. "Pull over, dude."

He didn't need to be told; Mac put the jeep as far on the shoulder as he could without falling off the pavement, so he didn't scare the next person who came whipping around the curve, and checked the rear view mirror before he hopped out of the jeep. He had the bike in his headlights, and Elliot stepped out of the beam, shielding his eyes.

"Hey, thanks for stopping, I – Mac?"

"Yeah, it's me and Jack." Mac approached the bike, putting it between him and the road. It was a two seater, and there was another helmet sitting on one of the seats. "What happened? Where's Drew?"

The blond scoffed. "My hero went to go save his damsel in distress. He took off down the road, I dunno, about ten minutes ago? You're only the second car that's driven by – not that you drove by, I mean, thanks for stopping-"

"Yeah, no biggie dude." Jack had hung back, keeping an eye on the road. They were both well aware of how easy it was to get hit on this particular stretch of Linbar, and Elliot hadn't pulled his bike over nearly far enough. "My man Mac here's pretty handy with bikes. You break down?"

The blond man huffed, and gestured at the bike. "So two weeks ago we got it out of storage, and there was a . . . uh . . . something about a clog in a fuel injector? Drew said it was just because we'd had it in storage a while, he went and got some part, it was fine until now . . ."

Not an unusual problem, and thankfully, one that could be fixed without needing to take the entire bike apart, or replace a part. Mac knelt by the engine, tapping it to see how hot it was. Not too bad. "Hey, Jack, grab the toolkit out of the back?" The swiss army knife was his go-to, but this was going to take a real wrench -

Jack grunted at almost exactly the same moment Mac heard the shot. Suppressed. He looked up in time to see Jack hit the pavement, mostly on his back. His head bounced on the gravel, then tipped towards him.

Mac made it about four steps before what felt like a linebacker grabbed him from behind and squeezed. His lungs seized, and the telltale crackling of a taser, the icy hot contacts on the back of his neck, finally registered.

He fell hard, head and back still arched from the muscle contractions, and gloved fingers brushed the hair away from the side of his neck. The needle was small gauge, and whatever was in it stung. Mac was too stunned from the taser to hear the words being spoken to him.

Jack was looking at him. His head and eyes were still locked forward, Mac couldn't do anything more than watch him as he tried to push himself up. He didn't get much further than moving his left arm a little. The headlights caught the blood, the liquid gleam of it on his chest, but they shadowed his face. He heard Jack suck in a breath, heard the rattle. Heard footsteps, in the gravel, coming up from behind the jeep.

Above him, someone patted Mac on the back. "Time for a little after dinner nap, gorgeous."

His muscles were slowly relaxing, and Mac managed to push himself up onto his forearms as someone – Drew – stepped into the edge of the headlight beam, a pistol in his left hand. He approached Jack, who either didn't hear him or wasn't cogent enough to react. Jack kept staring at him, and he moved his left arm again, in a futile attempt to grab a gun that he wasn't carrying, because they'd been at a volunteer event, and his gun was safe in his glove box in his car in Mac's driveway.

Numb warmth crawled into Mac's brain, he felt it move through his skull in a wave, and he slipped back to the pavement as Drew came to a stop at Jack's feet, and then raised the gun to Jack's chest.

-M-

Pain flared in his neck, and Mac fought to open his eyes. He didn't remember closing them. Whatever the position of his head, his neck was killing him, and he rolled it a little to the right, seeking relief.

"Well, aren't you punctual," a voice purred, very close by, and someone slid into his lap. "The bottle said forty-eight to fifty-two minutes, and you woke up right at the big five oh."

It helped orient him; Mac realized he was sitting in a chair, upright, and he rolled his head further to the right, squeezing his eyes shut as a blinding light seemed to explode into existence. Someone cupped his face and tilted it up, and Mac risked the pain and jerked his chin out of the other person's grasp, squinting.

There were two very bright lights, above and in front of him. Not interrogation lights, more like – stage lighting. Between them, a broadly grinning Elliot came into view, and then he shifted in Mac's lap, turning so he was leaning back against him.

"Is it time for our close-up?"

It seemed like he was talking to someone else. Across from them, a red light came on, and then a figure stepped in front of the one of the big lights, and picked up the light stand, moving it about a foot. That was about the time Mac tried to move his arms, and realized that he couldn't.

Slightly more alert, Mac swallowed some moisture into his throat. "Where am I?" He remembered the jeep, the bike -

 _Jack!_

Mac leaned away and craned his aching neck, looking around more carefully, and in his lap, Elliot made a little huff of disappointment. "A dump, I'm afraid," he admitted. "Not the place I would have picked, but let's face it, I wouldn't want to burn down any of the places I would pick, so . . . there's that."

The bright lights made it hard to see, but Mac could tell it was a large space. It was dark, obviously still nighttime, and the floor was concrete and strewn with what looked like old piles of lumber and construction materials. He couldn't see the ceiling at all. Wherever it was, it was cool, probably ambient temperature, and as much as he hated to admit it, the body heat sitting on his legs was welcome.

There was no other chair beside him. No other sign of anyone else.

He glared – at least he tried to. ". . . where's Jack?"

Elliot gave him a sympathetic look. "Oh, sweetie, you don't remember?" He nodded sadly, then tapped Mac on the nose. "Maybe that's for the best."

That . . . that couldn't be -

"Love, can I trouble you to find the light meter?"

The man on his lap sighed. "Someone's jealous," he confided, and patted Mac fondly on the chest, then flounced up to do as he'd been asked.

For a second, all Mac could do was sit there, stunned. He remembered the gunshot, the blood, the sound of fluid when Jack took a breath –

He'd been hit in the lung. Mac closed his eyes, seeing Jack's silhouette in the headlights, Drew standing over him. Try as he might, he couldn't remember if Drew had pulled the trigger.

It probably didn't matter. That section of Linbar wasn't well travelled at night, and even if it was, a driver would assume anything lying on the shoulder was a deer. Ambient temperature was about fifty seven degrees, Jack would have gone into shock almost immediately. Both their phones had been in the jeep, and in order for Drew and Elliot to have brought him here, they must have taken it. The phones would be off or destroyed by now. There would have been a very short window for help to get to him before Jack's core body temperature dropped too low, and then –

Mac swallowed, and then he forced himself to take a slow breath. Then another. Elliot – if that was even his real name – had said he'd been out for fifty minutes. That meant they hadn't taken him very far. If he could get out of this, figure out where he was, and find a vehicle –

Then he might still be able to get to Jack in time.

Mind slightly clearer, Mac opened his eyes. Even without a hundred pounds on his legs, he discovered he couldn't move those, either. A glance at his arms found that thin metal cable had been wrapped around them, from his wrist to his elbow. He couldn't see how they were secured, and Mac jerked his weight to the side.

The chair didn't budge.

Mac leaned over, as far as the cable around his chest would let him, and saw that metal brackets had been screwed into the aluminum chair legs, and bolted into the concrete floor. Very recently; the dust from shooting the bolts was still there.

"You're not going anywhere, I'm afraid," the voice behind the camera said. There was a loud hissing sound, cardboard sliding across the floor, and then Drew came into view, carrying a small tank of propane and kicking a heavy-looking, mostly flat Amazon Prime box.

"What do you want."

Drew graced him with a quick smile. "What everybody wants, Mac. A great big pile of money." He set the propane tank down with a muffled clang that told Mac it was full. "Nothing personal."

He pulled a knife from the back of his cargo pants, flipping open the blade with the same thoughtless flick that he'd seen Jack use a thousand times. Now that his eyes had adjusted somewhat, Mac could make out more of the camera, and something beyond it, maybe a director's chair?

"Kinda feels personal."

The man – the murderer – made an amused sound, slicing open first the Amazon box, then the box inside. "Well, I'm sure it is indirectly. You Phoenix agents have really made a name for yourselves out there. Kinda stupid for a supposedly clandestine agency."

Mac dredged up a smirk. "You mean like showing up to a Phoenix sponsored event, with your boyfriend, and spending hours making sure both your faces were on camera?"

Drew straightened, tucking the knife away. "You mean the cameras on the street? Hard to see through a bike helmet. And I hope you enjoyed your last meal. We weren't there." He bent and pulled a long, metal rectangle out of the second box, and once he'd plucked the styrofoam packing brackets off, Mac realized what it was.

The burner plate for a ventless gas fireplace.

Small tank of propane – and connection hose. Metal chair bolted to the floor, metal cable restraints. Elliot telling him he wouldn't want to burn a nice place down.

Drew watched him put the pieces together. "Come on. You're the amazing Agent Angus MacGyver. The man no one can kill. To hear Murdoc tell it, you can walk on fucking water if I give you an M&M and a ball of lint."

If the reality of what Drew had planned hadn't been enough, the mention of Murdoc certainly was. Mac's blood ran cold, and he glanced around himself again.

"Relax, he's not here." Drew crouched, busying himself with the regulator on the burner plate. "And what the fuck was that, anyway? We handed him to your agency _literally_ gift wrapped. You personally went to pick him up, and you kept custody of him all of what, two days?"

Mac watched him fiddle with the regulator, well aware of what he was doing. "So you're part of the Collective."

"Not anymore, obviously." He set down the plate, and screwed the metal hose to the gas line input. "And we need this payday to disappear, so really, this is your own fault."

"What happened to the ten million?"

Drew gave him a hard look. "What, you mean since Fletcher's no longer around to use his share?" He turned the valve on the propane tank, watching the pressure gauge. "Trust me. Ten million _apiece_ wouldn't have been enough."

The assassin backed up and pulled the propane tank clear. Then he reached back into the box, tugging a remote control free from the packing material.

MacGyver tried to make his voice mild. Tried to compartmentalize the fury, the fear – either Jack was still alive, or he wasn't, but he sure as hell couldn't help him unless he could get out of this. "And now you're going to alienate the only agency that's ever managed to catch him?"

Drew fished in the thigh pocket of his cargo pants, pulling out a platter battery. "You had your chance. We _could not_ have made it easier. If you can't handle that, you can't handle him. Frankly, this entire encounter has been a disappointment."

Drew jammed the battery into the remote, snapping on the back cover. Then he looked at the burner plate, and clicked.

There was a short series of ticks, like a barbeque trying to light, and then flames shot up through the plate, several feet into the air. Drew's futzing with the regulator had essentially destroyed it – the only thing limiting the flames was the regulator on the propane tank itself.

And unfortunately, he hadn't set it so high that the plate exploded.

Drew clicked a button, and the flames fell, so that only a few little blue ones danced across the surface as the rest of the gas was consumed.

Then the assassin looked at him.

Mac stared at the plate a second, then glanced up at him inquiringly. "What? No gasoline?"

The assassin smirked. "Fraid not. Someone is paying a lot of money to rent a theater in China, and apparently a whole gaggle of people who have a beef with your agency are going to be in attendance. They want to see if Phoenix's golden boy really will rise up out of the ashes. And I'm getting paid to give them a good show." He used the toe of his boot to slide the burner plate under Mac's chair, and a quick test of his restraints showed they were just as snug as before.

"That's a little . . . overly dramatic, don't you think?" Actually, that was downright convoluted. Someone who wanted him to burn alive on camera –

Actually, it sounded like something Joaquin Sancola – El Noche – would pay good money to see. And since he was in prison, video would be the only way. But not from China . . .

"This is going to be very unpleasant for you," Drew informed him. "Your skin is going to melt to the chair, and the fat in your thighs and calves is going to liquify and start steaming, which will cook the muscles in your legs. It's a self cauterizing process, so I estimate you'll still be alive at least five minutes in."

Mac had uneasily concluded the same.

"We might have to take a quick break to swap out the propane tanks, and I apologize in advance for that. I imagine the relief of turning off the heat temporarily will be far more excruciating than just powering through the whole thing straight."

He carefully didn't let his expression change. "Well, if you want to go pick up a larger tank –"

Drew laughed. "You're funny. And you're pretty, but I really expected more. I'd've never pegged Murdoc as a closet Belieber, but I'm beginning to think that's all the hype was."

Mac shrugged, as well as he was able. "Sorry to disappoint." He was strapped to an immovable chair, tied with uncuttable restraints, and no one was coming.

No one was coming.

Elliot trotted back into view, holding a light meter. "He really is gorgeous, though, isn't he? It should be criminal." They both glanced at him – Mac's was really more of a glare - and Elliot blushed. "Well, obviously it _is_ criminal, but still."

He knew it was grasping at straws, but he tried it anyway. _Not like I've got a lot of options here._ "It's not too late to come to some other arrangement . . ."

Mac had been thinking the monetary type, but Elliot's eyes lit up, and he turned to Drew like an excited kid on his birthday.

Drew gave him a doting smile. "No, babe. Remember, you make a plan, and you carry it through."

Elliot pouted, and then the front of his forehead exploded outward, and warm spray made Mac flinch.

The body ragdolled, landing face-first on the concrete, and the light meter clattered sharply across the floor. Drew managed a strangled little gasp, staring in horror as blood started to pool beneath Elliot's head.

Mac heard soft footsteps, leather soles on concrete, and he turned in the direction the shot had come from. He couldn't see anything outside the halo of the lights, but whoever it was sounded close.

"Hello, Drew." The voice was almost friendly, with an undertone of oily menace, and ice shot through Mac's chest. "That's good advice."

The assassin stumbled back a step, paling beneath the blood spattered across his face. His left hand shot to the small of his back, but he didn't have his gun. He didn't think he'd need it.

For the second time that night, Mac watched that mistake become fatal.

But then he realized his error. It was barbed electrodes, not bullets that Murdoc fired, and the coiled wires seemed to spring out of the darkness. The taser struck Drew squarely in the chest, and he stiffened with a guttural cry, then collapsed forward in a mirror of Elliot.

He was still holding the remote for the burner plate in his clenched right fist.

Mac froze, eyes wide, and the ticking of the taser sounded _exactly_ like the clicking of the auto light function of the burner. Second after second dragged by, and Mac braced himself, but the burner never lit. Murdoc left the electricity running for some time, and his face became gradually visible in the darkness as he approached. His clothing was black, it always was, and Mac still hadn't found his voice when Murdoc finally stepped fully into the pool of light. He released the trigger, then frowned at the device in his hand.

"I've never been a fan," he admitted, looking the taser over a moment before he found the cartridge eject. It clattered the floor beside Elliot's flaccid right hand. "But I will acknowledge non lethal force does have its uses, as clumsy as they are."

MacGyver stared at him. Murdoc seemed to have eyes only for the taser, and after turning it over and inspecting it again, he tossed it onto Elliot's corpse. Then the assassin's cold brown eyes locked onto him.

Murdoc seemed surprised; he even let out a little laugh. "Angus, you look positively terrified. I assure you I have no intention of doing the same to you. That would be, what, the second time in as many hours?"

Still chuckling to himself, Murdoc stepped around the growing pool of blood and approached the softly groaning Drew. He studied him a moment, then kicked his right hand, and the burner plate remote skittered across the concrete.

Murdoc looked at it, finally identifying it, then his mouth fell open in affected surprise. "Oh my stars and garters, look at that. It's lucky he didn't accidentally mash down on this! Then you'd have _really_ been in the hot seat."

He bent and retrieved it, making a show of turning it over slowly in his gloved hands, and Mac carefully forced himself to relax, forced his expression blank. His pulse was thrumming in his ears.

"You know, I will admit to imagining this moment," Murdoc told him, a little smile playing on his lips. "Phoenix, fire, you have to admit it would be almost Wagnerian. Oh, and the screams." He closed his eyes in bliss, lifting his chin a little as if he could actually hear them. "It's true what they say. Nothing is as purifying as fire."

Murdoc stood there a moment more, fingering the remote, listening to sounds only he could hear. Then, he brought himself back to the present with a little shudder of pleasure.

"But that will have to wait, Angus my boy. I'm afraid I have other plans tonight." The remote was slipped into a pocket of his black leather trench, and a white syringe was produced. "Although, I've just had the most _wonderful_ idea."

Grinning, the sociopath approached him, and there was nowhere for him to go. Murdoc grabbed his jaw, forcing his head back far enough that Mac couldn't shake him off, and then Murdoc angled him so that his throat was fully exposed. "You know, I've had the pleasure of watching you work now . . . is it five times?" He paused in thought, then raised the syringe to his mouth, biting off the cap and letting it drop into Mac's lap.

"No, I think it's six." He angled Mac's head further still, and the pain of the position, coupled with the previous ache, extracted a moan, so Mac went ahead and turned it into a growl. Where Elliot hadn't bothered to find a major blood vessel, Murdoc did, and his fingers were like steel through the leather glove. Whatever was in the syringe, this time it didn't sting; it was just cold.

"And yet, I've never returned the favor," Murdoc continued regretfully, releasing him almost gently. He smiled at Mac's glare, then reached down very deliberately and fished the cap out of Mac's lap. Murdoc's proximity made his skin crawl.

"Oh, well, there was your little foray into Slytherin House with the Architect, but that hardly counts. I barely even scratched the surface with you." The used syringe disappeared into the pocket with the remote, and Mac suddenly felt _profoundly_ unsettled, in a way he'd never experienced. A brick started to grow in the bottom of his lungs, and Mac tried to deepen the cadence of his breathing.

"And there was our time together in the sewer tunnels," Murdoc added. "But I'm fairly certain you've figured out by now that I let you go. Why else would I have left my tools?" It sounded rhetorical. "You did study them, though. Didn't you?"

Mac did his level best to glare, extremely discomfited by how difficult breathing was becoming. "Not really." It was hard to annunciate; he sounded like he'd had that drink he'd teased Jack about -

Murdoc's smile widened. "That _is_ the problem with chemical restraints, isn't it. You won't be much of a conversationalist. Last time I tried to slow down your mind, and we both know how that turned out. This time I've slowed down your body. It can be a little . . . disquieting at first." He waved a hand in the air. "You'll get used to it. And I did bring some oxygen, just in case." It seemed to suddenly occur to him that he didn't actually have it on hand, because he glanced back towards the direction he'd come with a small frown.

"Oh! But before we get to that . . ." Murdoc stepped away from him, now intent on the slightly squirming Drew, and another syringe came out of the jacket. This one was poked carelessly into the prone assassin's right hip. "Drew, would you be a dear and give us a few moments?"

Drew had bent his head a little, he was staring at the top of what was left of Elliot's skull, and Mac watched sweat – or maybe tears - drip from his jaw to the concrete.

Murdoc had straightened back up, and followed Mac's gaze, even taking a few steps away to try to gain the same perspective. He tutted in disappointment. "Really, Drew? You did the same thing to MacGyver and you don't see _him_ crying about it." Then Murdoc cocked his head. "Then again, I suppose you and Jack weren't exactly lovers."

He hoped whatever he'd been given – and he was beginning to think it was a surgical strength muscle relaxant – had left his expression blank. The less he gave Murdoc, the better.

Murdoc knew he'd been tased. He knew Jack had been shot. Had been killed. How would he have known –

Unless he'd been watching.

And even if he had, that didn't mean he was telling the truth. It didn't mean Jack was dead, it didn't -

"Or maybe you were," Murdoc allowed thoughtfully. "Color me surprised that the boy scout propositioned his captors! Taking a page out of Samantha's book, I see. What little alternate arrangement did _you_ have in mind, Angus?"

Murdoc knew the paralytic would eventually prevent him from speaking at all. He was asking questions, hoping to get a response, to gauge how effective the drug had become. Mac continued glaring at him, silently.

The assassin waited a few moments, then gave him a knowing look. "You don't want to tell me? I understand." He reached down and patted Mac's knee, a little too familiarly. "I'm just going to let you get settled, and get everything set up. I know, I know, you're more of a proponent of making it up on the spot, but I think this could be a great demonstration of the power of preparedness."

And then Murdoc swept back into the darkness, and was gone. Drew lost consciousness only a few moments later, leaving MacGyver basically alone for the first time since he'd woken up – wherever he was.

The brick in his lungs gradually stabilized; breathing remained difficult, but not increasingly so. He could blink, but it was very challenging to get his eyelids up more than half mast, and they were occasionally spasming. His mouth had fallen partially open, and swallowing was problematic. He didn't dare move his head; he was afraid it would tip forward, which would only close his airway further.

Despite what he imagined he looked like, Mac was completely alert. His cognitive abilities – and his nerves – didn't seem to be compromised. His heart rate was still elevated, he could still hear his pulse in his ears, so the paralytic was only affecting the skeletal muscle system. Likely a non-depolarizing neuromuscular blocker, the kind used to restrain electroshock therapy patients, or -

If he hadn't been in trouble before, he sure as hell was now. Even if Murdoc released the restraints, he could do literally nothing about it. He couldn't even bend his fingers by the time he heard something trundling on wheels over the concrete.

He was completely at the assassin's mercy. And Murdoc knew it.

"So, normally, I don't have an audience," Murdoc started, almost shyly. "And of course, with a typical job, you have to make some accommodations for practicality. In this case, it's all about the message. And that means going a little more . . . theatrical than I might otherwise."

The man pushed a flat cart into the light, containing a few boxes, what looked like a folding lounge chair, and a dentist's stainless steel tray and stand. Even moving his eyes was as chore, and MacGyver settled for observing mostly through peripheral vision.

"First things first – let's get you a little more comfortable. We're going to be here a while."

Murdoc made quick work of setting up what turned out to be a folding zero-gravity lounger, complete with armrests and little pillow velcroed to the top, and he set it off to the side. Still in the light, but not being blinded by it. Once Murdoc was satisfied it was stable, he approached.

"Drew really outdid himself. I don't think even you would have escaped this," he chuckled, circling behind MacGyver. He heard what sounded like a padlock being spun, then some metallic jiggering. He felt the cables around his chest and arms loosen, but he couldn't even twitch his arm in response.

"I did sometimes share stories about you," Murdoc continued, making short work of uncoiling the cables. "I mean, how can you not? Standing around the water cooler, shooting the breeze with your coworkers . . . I hope you don't mind. You were the only 'one who got away' . . ." He rolled his eyes at his own joke. "I must admit, I'm a little surprised at how easily you let them take you."

As soon as he was completely untangled from the cables, Murdoc picked up and threw Mac's left arm around his neck. "Up we go, Angus."

Mac was unable to help even marginally, even if he'd been inclined, and Murdoc straightened effortlessly. His back and shoulders were just as hard as his hands had been, and even though Mac had frisked Murdoc, which had required him to actually touch the other man, he hadn't noticed how muscular Murdoc's frame really was. It took him very little time to maneuver them to the lounge chair, and Murdoc let him slump into it.

His body folded like a cooked noodle and his head lolled to the side, compromising his airway. Murdoc straightened, and gave him a measuring look. "I'm trying to imagine you at MIT, after a frat party," he told him. "At least you don't weigh very much."

He angled the lounge chair slightly back, then fussed over him, straightening him in the chair so that his feet were on the bottom bar – as if he had the ability to use that leverage – and his arms were on the armrests. The last thing Murdoc did was straighten Mac's head, which he was quite sure was intentional, and he breathed a little deeper as the assassin arranged him onto the surprisingly soft cushion.

Angled as he was, his body was able to sink into the lounger, with his head in the perfect position to stare at the aluminum chair he had so recently occupied.

Murdoc gave him a satisfied smile and patted him on the cheek. "There we go." Then he frowned, and the glove on his cheek cupped his jaw. "Angus, you're freezing." Murdoc paused. "I guess you weren't expecting that to be a problem tonight, hmm?" He disappeared from view, and Mac heard him rummaging around. He reappeared shortly with a black throw, and he made a production of draping it over him.

Like a shroud.

"Now, don't go falling asleep on me," he chided. Then he was out of sight again, back in the boxes.

Mac heard metal grinding on metal. There was an odd, low pitched plastic crumply sound. Small wheels squeaked as they rattled over the floor behind him. Murdoc appeared on his right side.

"Honestly, you would be surprised how much I've had to learn about pharmaceuticals over the course of my career." He couldn't see it very well, but Mac felt something cold and wet being drawn across the back of his right hand. The harsh bite of rubbing alcohol tickled his nostrils. "Not just poisons – which are _not_ a female only domain, you can't always believe what you read – but others. Mostly to incapacitate, of course, but some jobs require interrogation, and there are far more effective means than sodium pentothal and scopolamine."

There was a sharp pinch, made worse by the fact that Murdoc hadn't let the alcohol evaporate, and Mac laboriously dragged his eyes down to see that Murdoc was running a needle into the back of his hand. It was attached to a clear line, which Mac imagined ran to whatever Murdoc had hung on the IV pole he'd assembled. The same as last time.

Only this time, it was a muscle paralytic. And Murdoc clearly wasn't going to be asking any questions. At least not questions he expected to be answered.

He taped it down, then patted Mac's hand, which didn't feel awesome, but thanks to the paralytic he wasn't able to make a sound. That seemed to be what Murdoc was testing, because the man suddenly reached out and grabbed his right trapezius, twisting sharply.

He did cry out then, the sound inarticulate and little more than a sharp exhale across relaxed vocal chords, but it seemed to satisfy Murdoc, because he let go. "Getting a baseline, if you will," he said, by way of explanation. "Now I think we're ready to begin."

Then the sociopath approached Drew.

The other assassin was still unconscious, and Murdoc started at his feet, unlacing his hiking boots. "As I'm sure he told you, Drew Schultz was one of my recruits – like Henry Fletcher. He's . . . uniquely able to approach certain otherwise inaccessible targets." The first boot came off, and Murdoc got to work on the second. "He was one of a handful of my colleagues who . . . let's just say hadn't realized that certain sacrifices need to be made to take advantage of greater opportunity." The second boot was discarded, and Murdoc grabbed the man by the waist of his cargo pants, rolling him onto his back.

"And that is how we ended up spending that lovely day running all over the snowy Midwest." He unbuckled the other man's belt, unzipped his pants, and unceremoniously yanked them off.

"While of course I wouldn't trade our little conversations on the train for anything," and at this point he glanced up, maintaining eye contact with a piercingly sincere expression, "I do have a certain . . . reputation to protect."

Drew's boxers were removed in the same manner as his pants, and Murdoc paused to remove his socks, as well.

"With the . . . realities of that betrayal in mind," and Murdoc got to work on the other assassin's shirt, "I can of course see in hindsight that I made several mistakes. It was my first real job in management, so I feel as though I should be allowed some leeway." Drew's teeshirt and undershirt were pulled over his head, leaving him naked on the concrete floor, still unconscious.

Murdoc gathered up the clothes with the air of a parent resigned to picking up after their angsting tween. "My first mistake was to treat my employees as my 'friends'. Maintaining that sort of relationship at work is complicated, Angus. I'm not certain how it is you seem to manage it so effortlessly."

Murdoc disappeared back towards his boxes, and shortly reappeared with a gallon tank, to which a landscaping sprayer was attached. "I've seen Matilda at your house, and she seems to treat you with an almost motherly air. Perhaps you tolerate it so well because of what you missed out on as a child?"

Going after his parents. Nothing more than a transparent effort to get a reaction. Mac gave him nothing.

The sociopath clicked his tongue. "Sorry, I forget that you can't answer. But allow me to make the supposition. At any rate," and he gestured with the sprayer, "I do not seem to have that skill. I suppose as I raise my son, I'll develop those tools, but until then, this training will have to suffice."

He set the tank on the ground, twisted the handle on top and pumped a few times to build up pressure in the tank, and then starting spraying Drew down with the liquid.

Whatever it was, it was basically clear, and Murdoc misted it rather than soaking him. "Listen to me, I'm babbling. It's so . . . refreshing to have a student. What I once was to Nicholas, you are now to me. I believe I've given you the setup. Obviously, I can't have my employees capturing me and selling me to intelligence and law enforcement agencies every time there's a disagreement about policy." Murdoc kicked a toe under Drew's hip, rolling him onto his front, and began misting down the other side of him.

"Now, Henry, I had to deal with quickly. He was the ringleader, and if he had realized that Cassian and I had declined Phoenix protection and left the little nest I'm sure you had set up for us, he might have made himself more difficult to find." Once he had sprayed down every inch of the unconscious man, Murdoc carried the tank over towards Mac.

"Drew, on the other hand, is merely an accomplice, and one that is extremely motivated by money and creature comforts. I mean, look at him." Murdoc turned and did just that. "He takes very good care of his body. It's important to him that it look and function adequately, not only for his chosen profession, but his chosen . . . recreation." Murdoc's gaze slid lower, apparently to Elliot. "He was very open with his colleagues about his proclivities, and, well, when you do what we do for a living, there's very little you haven't been exposed to." He cast an 'am I right' look over his shoulder, and Mac tried hard to find a neutral place to put his gaze that was neither on Murdoc, or whatever he was planning to do to Drew.

"My point is, everyone knows that Drew will literally stop in the middle of a job to deal with a hangnail." Murdoc set the tank and sprayer down beside the lounger, and Mac would have recoiled if he could have as the assassin reached for him.

Gloved fingers nimbly started unbuttoning Mac's shirt. "Therefore, if I want to punish Drew, the first thing I should do is make him uncomfortable."

Once he had the upper half of Mac's chest exposed, Murdoc grabbed the sprayer, and something that smelled decidedly plant-based, almost like a spicy mango, misted onto the skin of his chest and neck. It was especially cold, given the chilly ambient temperature, but it didn't sting or burn.

Murdoc set down the sprayer, and helpfully folded the edges of Mac's shirt back together, though he didn't button them. "We'll just let that sit for a moment."

Mac slid his eyes back to Drew, trying to gauge what the substance was going to do, and he noticed that Drew's skin was starting to look mottled under the bright lights. That could have been from a number of factors, including whatever Murdoc had dosed him with and the cold, and a loud plastic hiss drew his attention back to Murdoc, who was pulling a pair of white painter's coveralls out of its packaging.

"As I'm sure you yourself have experienced, it's very unsettling to find yourself in a different place and position than you were when you fell unconscious. You have no idea what someone might have done to you. How . . . inappropriate it might have been." He knew exactly what Murdoc was insinuating – he was out almost an hour, and it wasn't the first time, or even the tenth time he'd had that experience – and Mac carefully corralled his brain.

All Murdoc had were his eyes and his breathing to gauge his emotional state. If he could control those, he could give the man next to nothing.

It didn't help that his chest and neck were starting to tingle.

Murdoc whipped the coveralls through the air, fully unfolding them, and Mac saw it was an all in one – gloves, boots, jumper, and hood. He started at Drew's feet, drawing the coveralls halfway up his body before turning him onto his back.

"I don't want Drew to lose too much body heat, lest the cold act as a numbing agent," Murdoc continued, "so I've selected a less breathable Tyvek. It's not a terribly soft material." He continued stuffing the unconscious assassin in the coveralls. "When he wakes, he won't know that his skin was treated with an irritant. He'll assume it's merely a reaction to the fabric."

Murdoc was fairly quick, getting Drew zipped up and covered heat to toe, so that only his face was exposed. All the while, Mac's chest continued to tingle. The skin was also starting to feel warm.

He watched Murdoc grab Drew beneath his armpits, hefting the larger man up, and drag him to the aluminum chair. He arranged him with none of the care he'd shown Mac, and used the metal cables to secure him at the wrists and ankles. He didn't bother to wrap anything around Drew's chest at all, leaving him a surprising amount of wiggle room, though Mac knew it wouldn't do the assassin any good.

The ability to throw your weight around was only useful if you could upend the chair, and that one wasn't going anywhere.

"I know what you're thinking. You could have found a skin irritant somewhere in this warehouse and fashioned a plastic toga, and of course I agree." Murdoc's tone was conciliatory. "However, I think in a few hours you'll find that just a small amount of forward thinking can reap a substantial improvement over improvisation."

Whatever the irritant was, it was starting to itch, just a little, and Mac wondered if it was a derivative of urushiol, the ingredient in poison oak and poison sumac that caused an inflammatory immune reaction.

"Now, knowing my target, his fitness level, I can estimate his metabolism, and apply the appropriate amount of drug to ensure he stays compliant while I need him to, but doesn't take too agonizingly long to come around . . ." Murdoc glanced at his watch. "Which gives us about ten minutes, give or take. How about I go make us some snacks, and you keep an eye on Drew here, okay?"

And then Murdoc walked away.

He knew that delay was just as much to let Drew come around as it was to unsettle him. But it was fucking working. Drew was now seated where he had been, and Murdoc hadn't moved the burner plate. Worse, Murdoc had the remote in his pocket. If the thought of being cooked alive wasn't bad enough, pre-sensitizing someone's skin beforehand –

And Murdoc hadn't even broken out his dentist's tray yet. Or half of the contents of the rest of the boxes.

Murdoc was going to walk him through a murder, step by step. And even if the man had killed –

Mac closed his eyes, and tried to take a deep breath. The brick in his lungs wouldn't let him.

Even if the man had killed Jack, even if Jack had died, or would die, that didn't mean he deserved this.

No one deserved this.

He deserved to rot in a hole for the rest of his long life, staring at a concrete wall, with nothing to enjoy. Nothing to look forward to. Nothing to alleviate his boredom. He deserved to sit with his thoughts and know that his own choices had put him there, and had earned him that life.

Because maybe, just maybe, facing that would be enough to change his mind. Make him cooperate with authorities. Force good to come out of so much evil.

That was what criminals deserved. The chance to live a better life, the opportunity to make a different choice. Suffering of their own making, but escapable.

 _You really think Murdoc's ever gonna change?_

Unbidden, Jack's words echoed in the space. All the time he'd spent wondering, what pressure he could put on Murdoc, what therapy, what technique would shift that mind from pain to . . . something else. Even if it was good just so Murdoc could lord it over them, feed his ego, find a way to excuse it, to at least intellectually stay true to whatever code he held dear, but still have something worthwhile come of those efforts.

Jack said even if Murdoc had a heart, he would never do anything out of the goodness of it. And maybe that was true.

But maybe you didn't need a good heart to do a good thing. The road to Hell and all that.

And even supposing that was true, how the hell was he supposed to get Murdoc to do that when he couldn't talk, couldn't move? How was he anything other than the audience Murdoc's ego desperately craved?

Murdoc may have come here to save his life, but that was only so he could take it himself. Mac didn't think it would be any . . . 'fun,' for lack of a better term, if he couldn't move, but frankly this was new territory. If he'd truly made some kind of emotional connection with the murderer on the train, and in that warehouse . . .

Did that give him influence? Influence to do what?

Across from him, the white-clad assassin heaved a little sigh. Mac concentrated on keeping his breathing as even as he could, on keeping his eyes impassive.

Which was pretty fucking hard to do with Jack's voice still echoing in his ear.

 _I can't think about that right now._ Jack had either been spotted by a passerby, or he hadn't. There was nothing he could do about it. Not now. It would take hours for this neuromuscular blocker to get out of his system.

There was nothing he could do.

Jack was on his own.

And so was he.

He never heard Murdoc approach; suddenly a bucket of popcorn landed in his lap, and if he could have moved, Mac was pretty sure he would have shot a couple feet into the air.

The popcorn gave him something to focus on. Distract him. It was still hot, fragrant with butter and salt. The warehouse must have power, he had to have recently popped it –

On his left, Murdoc set down a wheeled stool, not unlike you'd find in a doctor's office, and settled in, like it was just another movie night.

"Now that we've gone to all the trouble of making Drew uncomfortable, we go ahead and let him enjoy it." Murdoc helped himself to the popcorn. "Honestly, a good part of this job is letting your victim do the heavy lifting."

And that was exactly what he did. Murdoc didn't say anything to Drew, even when the other assassin groaned, and finally opened his eyes. The skin on his face was a little red; just looking at it made Mac's own chest itch even more. Drew didn't say anything, even when he finally picked up his head and realized where he was, looked down at himself. He fidgeted in the chair, glaring balefully at Murdoc, but he never said a word.

Not that Mac could think of anything the assassin could say that would change his circumstances. It was too late for an apology, and Mac's eyes dropped to Elliot's body, lying where he'd fallen.

Jack probably was too.

Mac closed his eyes, and he concentrated on the scent of the popcorn. Concentrated on showing nothing.

It didn't take long for Murdoc to notice. "Now, now, MacGyver, I'm not going to all this trouble so you can sleep through a lesson. Open your eyes."

It was the only form of defiance he could show, so Mac left them closed.

On his left, he heard the man sigh, and then Murdoc sharply took his feet. Mac would have flinched if he could, but he didn't open his eyes.

It wasn't as if Murdoc couldn't open them for him.

But the sociopath didn't. Instead, he heard Murdoc stride purposefully across the room, in Drew's direction.

"Just get on with it already," Drew growled, and then Murdoc made a frustrated noise.

"You wouldn't believe how many times I've heard that. Are you all such gluttons for punishment?" There was the sound of Tyvek shifting, then the unmistakable crack of bones grinding against each other, and Drew bellowed in surprised pain _._

Mac got his eyes back open, adrenaline dumping into his blood but making no difference in his ability to move, and he saw that one of Drew's fingers, in the white gloves, was bent grotesquely upwards. Murdoc was standing in front of him but looking back towards Mac, very disapproving.

"Every time you close your eyes for longer than a blink, Angus, I'm going to break one of Drew's fingers." He sounded like he was lecturing a rowdy schoolboy. "If we run out of fingers, we'll . . . get more creative."

Drew had clamped down on any additional noises, breathing hard through his teeth, and he squirmed against the back of the chair. Apparently moving had set off the skin irritant, and now that it had been inflamed, it was that much worse.

Murdoc was watching him carefully, and Mac blinked when he had to, but otherwise he kept his eyes open.

Shaking his head to himself, Murdoc returned to the stool, inhaling deeply and holding it a moment before he relaxed. His breath smelled of popcorn.

"Angus, there's always a point to my stories, surely you've noticed the pattern by now. I would have thought you'd be more interested."

Mac didn't look at him, and he didn't look at Drew. Murdoc said eyes open, he didn't specify what to watch.

And if the sociopath minded, he didn't say anything about it. He tossed another piece of popcorn into his mouth. "And quite frankly, given what Drew did to Jack, I would have thought you wouldn't mind my dishing out a little extra pain."

Mac braced himself, and started counting the number of two by eights in the stack of old lumber he could just make out on the far side of the pool of light.

Murdoc gestured with a piece of popcorn at Elliot's corpse. "I can almost see him - I'm sure the memory is still vivid for you. Lying out there all alone. Shivering, drowning in his own blood . . . only the stars to keep him company." Murdoc gave a dramatic shudder. "I wonder if he flashed back to your time in Afghanistan. Cold desert nights? Wondering why he heard so much activity, but no one stopped. Why you didn't come back for him."

Mac didn't close his eyes, but he didn't look at Murdoc. Twenty-seven two by eights, which weren't actually two by eight but really one and a half by seven and a quarter inches, meaning one hundred ninety-five and three quarter inches long, if laid end to end and eight feet long, or forty and one half inches if laid like a hardwood floor -

The killer gave a gusty sigh. "I suppose it hasn't hit you yet. Dalton was the father you always wished yours had been."

And – and they each weighed 21 pounds if they'd been kiln dried, so that stack was – was five hundred and sixty-seven pounds -

 _Shut up. You don't know what you're talking about._

"In some ways better, I suppose. He never abandoned you. He was always there. Something about a . . . a 'wookie life debt'?"

Somehow, that fact that Murdoc knew that stung. That he mocked it, and everything those words represented to Jack.

And meant to him.

 _Because that fucker doesn't understand it, and never will. He's jealous._

"Well," and it was clear Murdoc was trying to find a bright side, "at least Drew did you the favor of uncomplicating things. Once you do find your real daddy, you won't have to unload the spare."

Never in his life had he wanted to hit Murdoc as much as that moment. Break his jaw so that he'd just fucking stop talking. His fury was so strong that his sight literally blurred, and he heard his breathing hitch as his body fought to burn through the adrenaline in his blood, that wasn't getting spent by slack muscles.

"Oh." Murdoc's voice oozed false concern. "Oh dear, have I overstepped? You sound upset, Angus."

Mac discovered he had very little control over his diaphragm. It shook with every breath.

And that just pissed him off more.

Murdoc reached out and took his chin, ever so gently shifting his head so that he was looking back towards Drew. His voice was quiet. "There's the person who did this, MacGyver. He didn't have to. He could have walked into your house, the same as Henry. He didn't have to work beside you, pretend to be your friend. Pretend to be Jack's friend. Dalton's name wasn't on the contract, just yours. Drew didn't _have_ to kill Jack. He just . . . wanted to."

Jack's name wasn't on the contract.

If Jack had just driven himself, if he hadn't taken the most obvious path home, if -

". . . you mean like you wanted to kill Elliot?" While Mac couldn't say a word, all the hatred and pain he could ever have expressed was in Drew's voice.

"Oh please." Murdoc released Mac with a shake, standing and stalking across the light towards Drew, and Mac was almost grateful for the distraction. "You involved Elliot. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a once in a million chance you meet a man who thinks contract killing is the coolest thing ever, and supported your work, but it's not like _I_ brought Elliot here tonight. If you ever actually loved him," and Murdoc made no attempt to disguise how much word disgusted him, "you would have dumped him the moment you knew I was free."

Drew didn't seem to have any problem finding the words. Or vocalizing them. "You son of a bitch . . ."

Murdoc rolled his eyes. "Besides, that was a mercy killing." He gestured dismissively at the body. "He never even knew what hit him. I couldn't have been kinder if I'd tried."

The bound assassin growled, his teeth bared, and Murdoc tilted his head.

"Not like you."

He began to circle Drew, slowly, very close to the back of the chair, but out of range of any flailing foreheads or elbows when he came around to the front. Always just far enough away, with a careless ease borne of far too much practice. "You could have done that. A bullet in my brain. Squish, problem gone."

Drew seemed to be having as much trouble controlling his breathing as Mac was. "Henry was the one who wanted to turn you in. It's not like it was a democracy-"

Murdoc lunged forward, slamming his hands down on Drew's bound ones, including the broken finger. Drew shouted with pain.

"You split the money like it was a democracy!" Murdoc snarled. "Hear that? You _do_ have a voice after all. Maybe you should have used it!"

Murdoc released him, tweaking the broken finger again, and Drew did his best to close his mouth, breathing through the worst of it. Murdoc resumed his slow stalking as if nothing had happened.

And Mac watched. Watched every move the assassin made.

This was how Murdoc toyed with him. Would toy with any of his friends, if he could get his hands on them.

"You could have been kind, if you call betrayal kind. But you weren't. You wanted the _money_. It wasn't enough that I gave you fair wages. Your pick of the jobs. Didn't bat an eye at the two, three week little 'getaways' where you couldn't be bothered to respond at all –"

His voice had been steadily rising, and Murdoc broke off, with an irritated little huff. It took Mac a second to realize that Murdoc was irritated with himself.

"I think the problem comes down to respect." Murdoc said it firmly, with a little nod. "I was too lenient, too friendly. I crossed the line between leader and colleague. That's my fault. I can admit that."

Drew's expression said quite clearly that he didn't agree with that assessment.

"And that is a mistake that I can rectify right now." Murdoc's circling had brought him behind Drew, and he dropped his hands to the other man's shoulders, kneading them painfully. "All I need to do is show that, from now on, I'm not a friend. I'm not a colleague. I'm the one who gives the orders. And my employees will follow them."

His hands stopped dangerously close to the other assassin's throat, and they squeezed hard enough to make Drew grimace.

"And you, Drew, you're going to help me write that memo. Are you ready?"

Drew eyeballed the propane tank a moment. The very thing he himself had brought into . . . wherever they were.

Probably wishing he'd gone for the bigger option. Or in a different direction altogether.

". . . fuck you."

For some reason, Murdoc seemed to think that was a delightful response. "Well, we just came full circle, didn't we? I'm flattered, of course, but given the new direction I'm taking the Collective, I think fraternizing with the employees would send mixed signals."

He gave Drew a couple punishing pats on the shoulder, then released him to stroll back towards his cart of boxes.

"I think there are several lessons you can glean here, Angus," he murmured, not significantly lowering his voice but making it sound as if he didn't want Drew to overhear. "The first is, obviously, do what your boss tells you. The second, be careful what you say around the water cooler. Me included," he added, with a bob of his eyebrows. "But I'm not the only person who made _that_ mistake."

He reached into one of the boxes, and withdrew a white, unlabeled plastic cannister. He glanced around for someplace to set it, and not finding a handy table, put it in Mac's lap, beside the bucket of popcorn.

Then he raised his eyes, fixing Mac with a concerned look. "And how are you doing? Calmed down a little?"

Mac had found that staring at the burner plate saved him from having to look directly at Drew, Elliot's body, or Murdoc, and he kept his eyes trained there, until Murdoc maneuvered himself into line of sight.

"Your breathing sounds a little easier," he noted. "This may tickle."

Then Murdoc reached for him again, and ran a gloved finger from the bottom of his sternum, very lightly, to the top.

His anger had distracted him from the incessant itching of the irritant, but Murdoc's light touch set the nerves alight far more effectively than a strike would have. What was an annoyance blossomed rapidly into something he literally couldn't ignore, and Mac actually closed his eyes as the sensation continued to build, rather than dissipate.

And he just had it on his chest. Drew was covered head to toe with this stuff.

"Well, that looks like a ringing endorsement," Murdoc murmured. He removed the dentist's tray from the stack of boxes, assembling it unhurriedly, and raised it high enough that he could easily access it, but left it low enough that Drew – and Mac – could see the surface. On this, he unhurriedly spread out a black leather tool roll, and Mac dragged his eyes over if only to distract himself from the unbearable itching, assessing each tool and noting any modifications.

Nothing there was a surprise. In many ways, it looked a lot like the collection Murdoc had left him in the underground room. That Bozer had painstakingly entered into evidence, without telling him.

Everything a psychopath would need to cause a lot of pain.

"So now we've come to the interactive portion of the demonstration," Murdoc announced unnecessarily. "Drew is anxious. He's cold, he's suffering through intense physical discomfort and frankly he's handling it better than you are. He knows why he's here." Murdoc reached out and poked Mac playfully in the chest, tripling the itch with one simple touch.

"That's important, because now he knows how serious this is."

Murdoc made a show of evaluating all of the different metallic instruments, and then he surprised Mac by plucking the almost forgotten unlabeled white cannister back off his legs.

"He knows enough to be afraid. But he doesn't know _how_ to be afraid." Murdoc winked and tapped him on the chin with the cannister.

"Do you know that you can order almost anything off the internet?"

Mac figured it was a rhetorical question, and apparently so did Drew; he just watched Murdoc approaching, warily. Mac could see him grinding his shoulders roughly against the back of the chair, seeking relief from where Murdoc's ministrations had set his skin on fire.

Mac could relate.

"The cameras. The chair. The burner – that was a nice touch, opening it in front of MacGyver. Letting him figure out for himself what was going to happen. You see, that makes it matter." He gestured with the cannister. "MacGyver knew what to be afraid of. When you turned on those cameras, he would already know what was going to happen. He knew what to fear. He knew how much it was going to hurt. His anticipation of all that pain would make his fear grow."

Drew's eyes never left the cannister, and he recoiled a little when Murdoc came to a stop in front of him.

". . . .I know what you're afraid of, Drew."

The assassin just stared up at him, wide-eyed. He swallowed hard enough that Mac actually heard it.

"Can you just imagine what it's going to feel like?" Murdoc closed his eyes, a beatific smile on his face. "You never should have told anyone, Drew. Never tell them what you fear."

If the chair hadn't been bolted to the floor, Mac was sure it would have been rattling. He could _see_ the assassin trembling, and his face had gone pale beneath the flush from the irritant and the spattering of Elliot's blood. "Y-you . . .you son of a bitch! Just shoot me. _Shoot me_!"

Murdoc gave him a mock sympathetic look, then reached out and started unzipping his Tyvek suit. Drew struggled wildly, against Murdoc's hand, against his restraints, and Mac looked away. He no longer had any interest in what was in that cannister.

But Murdoc's voice, that impossible combination of malevolent and soothing, continued, even as Mac studied the darkness on the other side of the room intently.

"Shooting you would be kind. Were you kind to me, Drew?"

" _Shoot me_! Please! Christ, don't- anything else, anything else -"

The zipper was still being pulled down, inexorably slowly, and Mac felt his stomach turn queasily.

"They sell ladybugs on Amazon," Murdoc offered, almost conversationally. "Did you know? Bees, too. _Bzzzt_!" he shouted, suddenly, and Mac could hear Drew was sobbing.

Mac's body might have been useless, but his mind was working overtime. What had Elliot said? _I swear, he so much as sees a bug, and I have to call the fire department to come get him off the ceiling._

And Murdoc knew.

"I thought about bullet ants, but eh, so overdone in all the crime shows they base out here in the desert." Murdoc made a dismissive noise. "Spiders, well, you'd scare them more than they'd scare you. Except the poisonous kind," he allowed. "And they'd kill you too fast. I really want you to . . . to get to _know_ what it feels like. Really wallow in the experience. Not the way you imagined it . . . but the reality of it."

Mac couldn't understand a word Drew was gasping, other than 'please'.

The zipping sound had stopped, and then Mac heard the sound of fabric and leather. He presumed Murdoc was pulling something out of his pocket. He wiped it on something, it was hard to hear around Drew's half-muffled sobs. When Murdoc reappeared in front of him, Mac was expecting it, had heard him approach.

He didn't expect to see the man holding a white handkerchief.

"For, well, obvious reasons," and he rolled his eyes, "it's cumbersome to have you approach. However, I don't want you to miss out on the . . . nuances of what's going on." And then he held the handkerchief under Mac's nose.

There was no visible trace of blood or anything else on the material, but Mac held his breath anyway.

Murdoc cocked his head, and it was only then that Mac realized the other man wasn't holding the cannister anymore. "Honestly, Angus, you realize in a few seconds you're going to breathe anyway because you don't have the muscular control necessary to override your autonomic nervous system."

He knew Murdoc was right, but he still put off the inevitable as long as he could.

It wasn't very long.

His diaphragm contracted, sucking in air around the brick, and despite himself Mac detected the scents of human sweat, the plant-like skin irritant he'd smelled earlier, and a musky off-the-shelf anti-perspirant.

He dragged his eyes back up to Murdoc's, not understanding, and the killer watched him intently.

"Remember that scent."

An article from 2008 leapt to his mind. The first time researchers were able to isolate what they called the 'fear' pheromone in the sweat of novice skydivers.

Drew was afraid, and Murdoc was showing him what that smelled like.

Mac felt his gut tighten in disgust. Murdoc left the handkerchief in place, waiting for him to take another breath before he laid it on Mac's blanketed knee. Then he turned and went back for Drew.

Drew hadn't stopped sobbing, though the intensity of it ratcheted up as Murdoc sauntered closer and closer.

"Have you figured out what's in the cannister, Drew?" His voice was quiet, and full of malice.

The assassin gulped audibly.

Mac's stomach turned again.

A plastic lid was slowly and deliberately unscrewed.

There was a brief pause, as if the entire building was holding its breath. Mac could hear the buzzing of the lights.

Then Drew started _screaming_.

He couldn't help it. Mac's eyes flicked in that direction because it was human nature, when you heard another human make a sound like that, to _do_ something _._ Help them. Run away. _Anything_ to make it stop.

Murdoc had opened the cannister, and Mac watched him shaking it out like someone would sprinkle parmesan cheese onto spaghetti, holding the Tyvek suit open to ensure whatever it was fell onto Drew's stomach and groin before gradually working his way up, zipping as he went. Mac couldn't tell what they were, small black almost granules, they didn't look quite like ants, and the way they tumbled down his bared chest –

Ticks.

They were live ticks.

Hundreds of them.

Drew kept screaming, thrashing in the chair as Murdoc finished and zipped up the suit with a little flourish, and Mac looked away. Nothing blocked out the sound. He'd heard it before, or close to it, Afghanistan, in a burning 'vee, too hot for anyone to get them out.

Terror. Thoughtless, primal panic.

And pain.

Mac's stomach heaved, and what was left of his dinner made it most of the way up his throat.

Murdoc was just suddenly _there_ , a firm hand on the back of his neck, so unlike Jack's. pushing him forward into the popcorn bucket. What could flow back down his throat did, and Mac managed a weak cough, trying to keep the vomit out of his lungs. He was only marginally successful, particularly when his stomach repeated the maneuver, without the necessary muscle support from the rest of his esophagus.

It took him a long time to sort it out, with Drew's inhuman shrieks not helping the situation. His weak coughs gradually petered out, and an acidic burn deep in his chest told him he'd aspirated at least some of it, but Mac didn't have the muscle tone to get it up.

Murdoc rubbed his back, his touch disconcertingly soothing. "Can you breathe, Angus? Breathe for me."

Mac was leaned back up, completely without his permission, and his head was tilted back to open up his airway. Murdoc gave Mac a what might have been a sincerely sympathetic look, grabbing the sweat-scented handkerchief to dab at Mac's half-open mouth. "So much for the popcorn," Murdoc joked. "I can make some more if you get hungry later."

Drew's cries had fallen a little in intensity – he'd torn his vocal cords – and when Murdoc moved aside to dispose of the popcorn bucket, Mac could see him, crushing himself against the corner of the chair, writhing. He seemed to be trying to smash the insects, but ticks were extremely durable and fairly flat until they'd fed, all he was doing was spreading them around the Tyvek suit.

Spreading them around his body.

Ticks preferred the armpits, groin, and hair on humans. Folds of skin, anyplace they could feel relatively safe to attach and feed. Mac had no idea how many had been in the cannister, but he figured at least two hundred. With his skin hypersensitized by the irritant, Drew could probably feel each and every one of them, traveling across his body in search of a suitable home. Drew's face was screwed up in agony, and his arms were jerking so violently at the restraints that Mac would be astonished if he hadn't already broken his own wrists.

"This part only lasts a few minutes. It's very physically draining to sustain that level of intensity," Murdoc murmured, almost clinically. "The emotional terror doesn't abate, but the physical reaction does. You see that he's hyperventilating."

Mac's eyes shifted away, and he almost forgot he wasn't allowed to close them.

Though at this point he wasn't sure what else Murdoc could possibly do to the man. He was essentially swimming in his worst fear. They were everywhere, all over him, his chest, his scalp, his genitals -

With any luck he would pass out. Those had been too big to be nymphs, they were full grown ticks, meaning they could consume anywhere from two hundred to five hundred times their own weight in blood. The average adult dog tick weighed two hundred milligrams, and took four to seven days to become fully engorged. Assuming two hundred ticks, that was –

Almost nine pints of blood consumed in four to seven days. Literally every drop of blood in Drew's body.

Surely Murdoc wouldn't keep him for days. He'd tire of the game, Drew would go into shock, become unresponsive –

Mac almost didn't see Murdoc reach for his face, and he could do nothing as the man gently brushed his cheek. He then held up the gloved finger to the light, and Mac saw that the leather glistened. He rubbed his gloved fingers consideringly.

"I know you aren't shedding tears for him, if you wouldn't for Jack." Murdoc's voice was almost amused. "It's an involuntary response from the vomiting." Still, he sounded thoughtful, and then he stood up from the stool Mac hadn't even noticed he'd retaken, and approached Drew.

He was nearly spent, just as Murdoc had predicted, gasping out moans and still twisting against the chair frame, rubbing his right ear savagely against his shoulder. Murdoc bent in front of him, reaching out to capture his face. He released him without a word, holding his left glove angled carefully, and brought what Mac realized was a tear back to him.

"You're well read. I'm sure you've seen the research." It was almost dismissive. "The configuration of salt crystals in tears changes depending on the reason those tears were expressed. Your tears were from vomiting, an attempt to flush away toxins. His tears are from terror and pain. The difference under the microscope is fascinating, I'm sure, but you see, I discovered this using a sense other than my eyes."

Murdoc reached again for Mac's face, gently pulling down his lower lip, and Mac was horrified when the assassin touched the tear-laden gloved finger to his tongue.

"Fear tastes bitter." He pressed Mac's jaw closed, pinning his wooden tongue to the roof of his mouth, and against his will, even around what remained of the puke, Mac tasted salt, and the various other chemicals that made up the distinctive flavor of human tears.

His stomach roiled again, and he would have retched if he was physically capable of it. As it was, he could barely manage to breathe. Inhaling made the taste sharper.

Murdoc was unmoved. "They say as we evolved, humans lost the ability to detect these things consciously. The fear pheromone, the taste of terror."

Across from them, Drew was able to swallow one of his cries for the first time, and he petered out into gasping and whimpering. His movements were weakening, but no less desperate.

"But you can taste it. Can't you."

Mac closed his eyes, prying them open again as soon as he realized what he'd done.

Murdoc sighed, wiping his gloves off on a towel on the dentist's tray. "Well, that didn't last long," he observed. "And the way he's clenching his fists, I don't think I'm going to get a finger. How about . . . " He made a show of studying the tray, even as Mac looked at him, directly at him, hoping beyond hope that steady eye contact would convey that he hadn't meant to do that, it was a mistake-

"Ah! This should do nicely." Murdoc selected a dental file, a fairly slender one that narrowed to an impossibly sharp and delicate tip, like a dirk. The file looked almost threaded, from his limited view, and Murdoc flipped it expertly in his hand, and walked across the pool of light.

Drew didn't seem to even know he was there. He was still trying to crush the ticks, grinding his hip against the armrest and keeping his legs pinned tightly together, but through the Tyvek Mac could see the majority of the insects had fallen to the bottom of the suit, they were -

Mac's stomach heaved again, but it was empty enough that the acid only made it halfway, and he was able to swallow it down.

This time Murdoc didn't notice, He violently shoved Drew back against the chair, extracting a grunt of pained surprise. One hand stayed in the center of his chest, pinning him, and the other moved back and forth across his abdomen, the tip of the file not quite touching the Tyvek. He homed in on something; Drew jerked in his grasp, and then Murdoc slowly sank the file into the Tyvek, through his skin, and several inches into his body.

The assassin cried out in fresh pain, choking on the end of it, and Murdoc ripped the file quickly free. It had left only the smallest puncture in the Tyvek, and red just started to stain the coveralls as Murdoc brought the file back, cupping a hand beneath it as though he didn't want to drip on the floor.

And it wasn't because he was worried about leaving evidence.

"Now this is something Nicholas taught me." Murdoc was warming to his subject. "During interrogation, it's important to know enough anatomy that you don't accidentally pierce a major blood vessel and allow your target to bleed out before they've told you what you want to know." He extended the file, sideways rather than point first, and held it beneath Mac's nose.

MacGyver was profoundly grateful that it hadn't ended up in his mouth – drinking blood would be a little macabre even for Murdoc, not to mention unquestionably dangerous from a health perspective – but even so, he tried to hold his breath.

Once again, he was only able to for six or seven seconds, and then his diaphragm betrayed him, and the copper tang of blood assaulted his nostrils.

"What you're smelling is blood from the liver. With practice, you can detect a little . . . bite, in the odor, the scent of enzymes."

Mac would have given anything for the bucket of popcorn to still be there, but there was nothing else strongly smelling anywhere near him, and Murdoc left the file there for several breaths before he withdrew it and wiped it on the towel.

"Now don't get me wrong, killing at a distance is far more practical. Frankly, I feel like I should have apologized to you a long time ago. Had I known then what I know now, I would _never_ have tried to shoot you like I did." Murdoc shook his head rapidly, as if trying to sling the memory out of his skull. "Can you imagine what would have happened if I'd actually hit you? Or worse, killed you? Everything we've been through, all the places we've visited, the experiences we've shared . . . my life is certainly more . . ." He swallowed, searching for the words.

"Enriched. Dare I say, fulfilled, because of you."

With Murdoc on his left, Drew in front of him, and the dental tray of torture instruments to his right, there was no safe place to look, and Mac hunted for more neutral ground.

"I tell you all this because I want you to _understand_ why it is that I do what I do. Not in the way a – a profiler might, like Samantha. Not the way you study a text. It's the – the visceral. The way the thing tastes, feels, sounds, smells . . ." He threw up his hands and then sighed, as if frustrated. "You can never know another person more completely."

Mac could think of a hell of a lot of ways to connect to another human that did not involve the scent of their liver blood.

"Oh, I see Drew's a quick study." Murdoc patted him on the arm, gesturing as though they were watching a soccer match. "He's thinking again. He's made a deal with his fear. He has a _plan_."

Whatever his plan was, it wasn't apparent to Mac. Drew was now mostly still, twitching violently every now and then, but his breaths were coming deliberately slower and more steadily. He was putting himself through calming exercises.

If he could slow his heart rate, he could reduce his blood pressure, but it wouldn't make an appreciable difference to the blood in his capillaries, or the feeding pattern of the insects. His lack of squirming might encourage them all to settle down and stop crawling around –

In which case, his plan was to have them all latch on as soon as possible. Send himself into shock.

Escape. His plan was to die, as quickly as he could.

"The next step is to go ahead and let him do the heavy lifting for us again. His plan will slowly fall apart, and the panic will overwhelm him."

The next two hours took days to pass. Mac would have sold his left kidney for just a moment – just _one_ – where he was able to scratch the inflamed skin on his chest and neck. It was all he could do to remember that he wasn't allowed to close his eyes. Every time he did, the file came back out. Blood from the small intestine had a salty, almost vinegar like hint to it. Blood from the colon was one of the most stomach-churning things he had ever encountered. For whatever reason, Murdoc spared him the taste test.

Drew's pain and panic came in waves. It seemed as if he was able to pass out a few times, only to wake with agonized, gut-wrenching moans that didn't even sound human. When the words were intelligible around his sobs, his pleas were always the same.

And always ignored.

All the while, Murdoc talked. He told stories, Mac couldn't tell how many were true, about jobs he'd taken, jobs he'd heard about. The places he remembered learning the tricks of the trade. And the trade was murder. The more terrified his victims, the more Murdoc considered them successful.

Considered them art.

Knowing that every story had a point – every action had a point – the only one Mac could come up with was the simple conclusion that Drew wasn't the one who was supposed to be terrified, here.

Mac himself was.

He was getting a primer on how to literally frighten someone to death. Murdoc's ultimate achievement of success. The perfect piece of art would be Drew, dying in that chair not of shock, not of blood loss, but of terror.

That was how Murdoc planned to kill him. The only death that would do for the 'one who got away'.

Murdoc was blatantly applying the lesson to him even as he was explaining it. Step one: make him uncomfortable. Step two: tell him why he was there. Why he was targeted. And the lesson itself was step three.

Tell him what he should fear.

Mac opened his eyes, honestly unaware that they'd closed, and once again, Murdoc had seen it. "I realize you're getting tired, Angus. You've had a long day. But if you fall asleep now, you'll miss the coup de grâce."

The other man hopped to his feet, practically humming with energy, and reclaimed the file. Drew had slipped into clinical shock sometime in the past twenty minutes. His breathing was getting faster, his responses weaker. Red stained the Tyvek in several places, now, but not enough of it. Not enough to render him unconscious.

Right up until Murdoc shoved his head back, shifting the hood of the Tyvek suit, and placed the tip of the file against the man's right eyelid.

Murdoc inserted the file, just as slowly and deliberately as he'd done it before, and Mac closed his eyes despite himself, unable to watch. Drew wasn't able to get much sound behind the scream, his vocal cords were swollen and shredded, and the cry was much like the sound Mac himself had made when Murdoc had squeezed his trapezius, what felt like weeks ago.

When he actually heard the wet slurp of the file being withdrawn, and Drew shudder out a keening little gasp, Mac opened his eyes, afraid that being caught with them closed might cost the assassin his other. When Murdoc entered his field of view, with a tiny little smile playing on his lips, Mac knew he'd seen.

But Murdoc didn't call him on it. "Now, you would think the vitreous would smell and taste like tears, but you'd be wrong."

A clear gel-like substance was visible on the file, hovering beneath his nose, and Mac held his breath until he noticed something else moving on the file, too steadily to be a semi-liquid. Murdoc followed his gaze.

"Oh. One of the little guys wants to say hello, I see."

Murdoc cooed at the tick like one might a puppy, managing to convince it to transfer to his glove, and then he lowered the file – tip first - to Mac's chest.

The assassin's eyes bored into his as Mac felt the tip of the file on his flesh. Murdoc was using it to draw open his shirt, and even though he was barely touching the skin, it was so inflamed from the irritant that Mac could feel every hair being parted on the way across.

"It's truly remarkable what human nerves are capable of detecting," Murdoc murmured, using the file to slowly tease open the other side of his shirt. When that was done, Murdoc trailed it back towards his sternum, tracing over his heart with the tip pressed _just_ hard enough against his skin that Mac could feel the individual layers pulling apart along the long, thin slice.

For once the paralytic worked in his favor; it wasn't enough pain to warrant making a sound. Only an unsteady exhale gave him away.

Murdoc hummed, almost to himself, and replaced the tip of the file with the back of his forefinger. "There you go, little fella," Murdoc crooned, and when the tick was transferred to his skin, Mac could feel it, how sticky the hooks on its tarsus were. How slowly it moved, clinging to him for dear life, making certain each of its other seven legs were fully secure before loosening one for a step.

And that was just one little tick. There were hundreds of them on Drew. The sensory overload alone, feeling sixteen thousand tiny legs, wondering if each sensation was a hypostome being inserted into skin that had already been cut for feeding.

Murdoc had placed the tick just below the slice, and Mac could feel it, every motion, as it started to make its careful way to the left. Towards his armpit.

"Now before you start to worry, I assure you I haven't just given you hepatitis." Murdoc withdrew the file, apparently studying either the tick, or how much – or little – his chest was bleeding. "All of my employees undergo routine screening. I'm not sure they were all aware of it, but I couldn't have an outbreak of dengue fever getting us all caught, now could I."

Mac just looked at him, and managed to even out his next breath. Enough blood had oozed from the cut to form a droplet, and the tickle of it slowly rolling down his skin was worse than the sting of the cut itself.

Murdoc's face broke out in what was meant to be a fond smile. "You have such expressive eyes, Angus."

Mac dragged them to the right, towards Drew but away from Murdoc, and the killer tsked. "I didn't mean to make you self conscious. It's an honest compliment." He leaned forward, as if imparting a secret. "They've been talking to me all night."

The killer stayed like that, studying him a long moment, then finally followed his gaze, glancing over his shoulder toward Drew. His other victim gave a little gasp, having apparently lost and regained consciousness in those few moments, and Drew began to pant, squirming helplessly in his chair. Murdoc watched him, though it was clear his words were still for Mac.

"Pupils are very reactive to chemicals in the bloodstream. And what are emotions but chemicals."

Murdoc reached into one of the boxes that he'd set by his foot an hour or so ago, and Mac's stomach flopped as he came up with an unmarked white cannister, exactly the same size and type as the first. He had something else, something made of suede, and when he realized Mac was looking at it, he held it up with a smile.

"You know what this is, don't you?" He raised a suggestive eyebrow. "I should hope so, seeing what you proposed earlier this evening."

It was a ball gag. Wiffle ball style, with holes to assist the gagged person in breathing. And drooling.

"Now, watch Drew here. He's spent the last three hours in an intense and heightened form of terror, marinating in all those chemicals." His tone was conversational, until he realized that Mac was now studying the darkness off to his right.

" _Look_ at him."

It was a command, issued with the same menace as his edict earlier. Despite an almost overwhelming urge to disobey, he knew what that would cost Drew, and he reluctantly complied.

The tick was making good time, and he concentrated on that, letting it distract him from what he knew was coming next.

Murdoc seemed satisfied that he had Mac's eyes, even if not his full attention. "Even if I untied him right now and let him go, you and I both know he couldn't walk to freedom. He's physically and mentally spent. The man has nothing left, so it would seem."

The assassin took his feet and casually strolled towards him. He made no attempt to quiet his footsteps, and Drew didn't really respond to his approach. Blood and fluid caked his face from his ruined eye, and his other was squeezed shut. He whimpered when Murdoc forced open his mouth and stuffed the ball between his teeth, but otherwise didn't really respond as Murdoc tied it off behind the Tyvek hood. He brushed off his glove, and Mac saw a small black thing drop onto Drew's heaving chest.

The ticks had started fleeing his extremities, including his scalp. Shock was limiting the blood flow there, they were going to have to head for his core body if they wanted to continue to feed.

Drew was only peripherally aware of what Murdoc was doing, and Mac hoped fervently that he would pass out, have a heart attack. Find the escape he'd been seeking for hours.

Put an end to this lesson.

"Drew," Murdoc sing-songed, patting his right cheek, just below what remained of that eye. "Oh, Dre-ew. Drewski. Drewper-poo. Open your eye."

The assassin whimpered again, trying to avoid Murdoc's hands. Murdoc responded with a vicious backhand.

The assassin cried out, then choked, either from the cry itself or the saliva gathering in his mouth due to the gag. His left eye might have been slanted open, it was hard to tell but it was apparently enough for Murdoc. He grinned at the man, patting him more gently on the cheek.

"There you are, Drew. Here I thought we'd lost you." Murdoc bent down and retrieved the white cannister, waving it cheerfully at his face. "Are you ready for round two?"

Mac would have thought it impossible, that the receptors in his cells literally could not have bonded any additional epinephrine, but Drew's breathing increased, and he jerked his head away, back, anywhere to escape Murdoc's hands. The man teased him with the cannister, always keeping it in his line of sight.

"Oh, this? You want this? I bet you do, what a good boy," he crooned, as if to a dog. A sob broke through the gag, and he shook his head.

"Oh, you don't?" Murdoc pretended to give that consideration. "Say please."

Drew tried, Mac could see his tongue working, but the gag prevented anything like articulated syllables. All that came out was a keening wail. After the third, when he realized Murdoc either couldn't decipher it, or wouldn't accept it, he broke back down into sobs.

Murdoc made a sympathetic noise. And then he turned, and stared straight at Mac.

For a moment, Mac thought it was because Murdoc thought he'd closed his eyes, and so he met Murdoc's gaze head on, to show him that he couldn't use him as an excuse.

And Murdoc smiled.

"What about you, Angus? I mean, he murdered your partner, and tried to murder you. Since you're the last person he harmed, I guess it should be your call. Just say the word, and I'll let him live."

Mac's stomach sank.

The assassin cocked his head. ". . . no?" he finally asked. "You're not even going to _try_? That's not like you, Angus."

The best he could do would be the same noises Drew was making, and he knew it. They both knew it.

Even if he made the effort, it wouldn't matter. And that was Murdoc's point.

It didn't matter what he did. He couldn't stop what was going to happen next.

So instead, Mac used what little control over his diaphragm he had, and he managed a fairly passable sound to the affirmative.

"Uh huh."

Murdoc's smile became a full-blown grin. "I am _impressed_! Pitched and all. So that was definitely a yes, you want me to continue."

And Murdoc gleefully unscrewed the cap, grabbed a shrieking Drew by the chin, and shook a healthy dose of tiny black granules into his mouth. They passed through the ball gag, probably to the back of his throat.

Drew whipped his head from side to side, his intact left eye wide with horror, and Murdoc screwed the top back onto the cannister. "Oo, you actually got a couple out, there, Drew. Good job."

The man screamed again, the timbre of it different with his mouth wedged open, and Murdoc mimed tip-toing back over to Mac, screwing open the cannister with a child-like grin on his face. Behind him, Drew fought to crawl out of his own skin, thrashing in the chair. The movements were no less desperate, with a strength Mac wouldn't have believed he still had, but they were less coordinated than before.

There was no more thought, no more plan. It wasn't a conscious response. There was nothing there but blind panic.

He couldn't watch, but looking Murdoc's way wasn't any better. The other man hunkered back down on his stool as if he'd just pulled off a hilarious prank. "He just thinks these are ticks," Murdoc confided in a whisper. "But see – and Cassian introduced me to these –" And he fished one of the black things out of the cannister, and held it up where Mac could see.

It was a tiny little spider, more green than black, and Mac could see immediately that it wasn't real. It was matte, almost like some kind of rubber.

"So, you take these little bugs, and you put them in water, and they swell up into much bigger bugs, and then when you let them dry, they stay that size, and you can play with them," Murdoc explained cheerfully. "Now, with all that saliva in his mouth, there's going to grow pretty big pretty fast . . ." He heaved a regretful little sigh. "I don't think he's going to last very long. Do you think he'll choke to death _before_ they break his jaw, or after?"

His brain was already at work on that math before Mac could shut the thought process down, and then it occurred to him that he did have an option, a card to play. Just one.

He closed his eyes.

"Oh ho ho, you think you've found a little loophole, do you? You think if I damage him a little more, cause him just a _smidge_ more pain, he might pass out faster?" His voice was teasing, but underneath it was something close to anger.

"Look at me, MacGyver."

He did no such thing.

Murdoc picked up Mac's left hand and raised it, and Mac realized with a jolt that his own fingers weren't off limits. Nothing was. He braced himself as well as he could, and then he felt his fingertips pressed painlessly against warm skin.

Startled, Mac opened his eyes.

Murdoc had his hand against his throat, just above his carotid artery. Mac could feel Murdoc's pulse, strong and steady. When he spoke, the vibrations tickled his fingertips before traveling up Murdoc's throat to his lips.

"Do you feel that?"

Mac stared at him, not sure what he was getting at, and Murdoc wrapped his entire hand around his throat, folding it against the skin.

His hand was around the killer's neck, and he couldn't even squeeze.

Murdoc gave a little shiver, then leaned forward, staring at him intently.

"Remember what I told you about pupils?"

The pulse under his fingertips was quickening.

Behind them, Drew was starting to really struggle. It was clear he was choking more than he was breathing. Murdoc never looked away, never even blinked. His cold brown eyes bored into Mac's own, and he realized with a start that they were almost black, they were so dark.

His pupils were dilated.

Murdoc leaned even closer to him, and his pulse picked up another few beats.

"You . . . should . . . see . . . yours," he whispered.

Behind them, there was a half-gasp, cut off in the way only mechanical blockage could, and the sound of Tyvek scrabbling on aluminum. Mac was horrified, he closed his eyes but Murdoc grabbed his face with his free hand, prying his left eye open.

The scrabbling slowed. Murdoc's pulse was racing.

Tyvek hissed, and slowly settled, and Mac watched the last remnant of brown in Murdoc's eyes vanish.

The assassin shuddered, finally closing his eyes, and he took an unsteady, open-mouthed breath. He held it, and Mac didn't realize he was also holding his own until the ringing silence soaked into his awareness.

For the first time in hours, it was –

Quiet. Utterly quiet. He could barely even hear the buzz of the lights.

They hung there, in that moment, what felt like an eternity. Murdoc eventually released his breath, his eyes opening and brown again, frighteningly normal. He released Mac's eyelid, patting him on the cheek, and replaced his hand on the lounge chair armrest.

Mac left his eyes closed, and he did his damnedest to keep his breaths as slow and regular as he could. He'd lost track of the tick. It was no longer moving around.

It must have started to feed.

For a moment, there was quiet.

"Look at his face, Angus."

The voice was soft. Gentle, even. He probably used that voice when he spoke to Cassian. Went through the motions, mimicked what he saw others do, like it made up for the lack of feeling the actual emotion.

"That's how you send a message." He heard the assassin take his feet, and he expected to feel fingers on his face, forcing his eyes open again. Murdoc surprised him, and didn't touch him.

"Every single one of my colleagues knows what that expression means. They know exactly how to produce that kind of response in another human. The . . . specific combination of physical and mental anguish necessary to lock muscles into that particular configuration." Murdoc paused, apparently to appreciate his work.

"They'll know that I put some thought into it. Really spent some quality time with Drew."

He heard Murdoc move away, not in Drew's direction, but on the other side of Elliot. After a few moments, he heard a camera lens retract, and then it was taken off the tripod.

Murdoc continued the lecture, even as he manipulated the camera. "Your homework assignment, Angus, is to take note of how Drew's appearance will gradually change over the next few hours. I know you understand the chemistry and the biology, but I really encourage you to learn to appreciate the aesthetics as well. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said, without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable. That Nobel Prize he finally picked up truly was well deserved."

The camera was replaced on the tripod, and Mac suddenly realized what Murdoc had taken. The SD card.

Drew must have started a trial take, to check the footage for lighting levels, and then Murdoc had come along and no one had stopped the camera from continuing to roll. Drew had captured his own murder on video.

"I want you to take special note of the way his expression will . . . continue to transform." Murdoc was masking his footsteps, now, but his voice put him near Drew's body. Getting a closer look at his handiwork. "Cassian's little toys will continue to grow, and grow. They'll break his jaw, expand in his throat. The muscles in his face will be stretched out, and start to sag and relax. It will end up giving him a more resigned look. Less 'immediate terror', more 'crushing despair'." His voice was animated, even excited. "It's a _fascinating_ process to watch."

Though Mac heard nothing, he didn't even feel the brush of air on his hypersensitive skin, suddenly Murdoc's voice was _right there_ , right in his ear. Whisper quiet. "And this homework is for a grade, Angus. When you see that same expression on _their_ faces . . . you'll know _exactly_ how I put it there."

Mac kept his breathing locked down, even as he felt more adrenaline dump, icy cold, into his bloodstream.

"Dear Riley. All that time in the big house, hungry eyes on her every move . . . she must so _hate_ the feeling of being watched." His voice dripped false empathy. "If I get any really flattering pics, I'll be sure to text them to her. I wonder if she knows how young she looks when she's asleep, all twisted up in the sheets . . ."

Mac's diaphragm trembled a little, and there was nothing he could do about it.

"And your _bestie_ , well, that hardly takes an imagination as powerful as yours," Murdoc continued, with a soft laugh. "Poor Wilt is scared of his own shadow. I wonder if he still dreams about the good doctor, what a blade feels like being drawn across his belly . . . I think I'd leave him on the floor, holding his guts in his arms, waiting helplessly for you to come save him again."

He heard his own unsteady exhale, denying it even as it happened.

Murdoc clapped his hands down on his shoulders, exactly as he'd done to Drew.

"Now, Matilda . . ." The sociopath blew out his cheeks, painfully kneading the fully relaxed muscles of Mac's shoulders. The motion caught and stretched the skin on his chest, enough that Mac felt barely coagulated blood begin to seep again.

"She is a _firecracker_ , isn't she? Such a formidable woman, in such a wee little package. All alone in this great big male dominated world. Did she ever tell you why she left the CIA?" He paused, as if honestly expecting an answer. "Jack knew, but he never told you, did he. I'm sure you can put the pieces together," he added dismissively. "Now that's a job I might hire out, to someone a little more powerfully built than I am. Given how much of a thorn she's been in our side, I daresay a few of my more loyal employees would be _more_ than happy to indulge me."

He squeezed Mac's shoulders almost bracingly, dropping his voice further. "It's true, I'd like to feel her life leave that grotesque little body with my own hands, but as you may have noticed, I do sometimes like to watch."

At some point, Mac's eyes had opened themselves. He was too furious to keep them closed, and it was easier to stare at Drew's actual corpse than the ones being painted in his mind.

"And speaking of watching, it really is a shame about Jack."

The assassin came back around him, on his left, and Mac kept his gaze resolutely forward.

"I'd always hoped to kill you two together – or at least, in reasonable proximity," he admitted. "So you could watch each other die, knowing you were powerless to prevent it. Though I've got to hand it to Drew, timing it so that Jack lived long enough to see them take you away . . . he put himself through _excruciating_ pain, what with that broken rib and collapsed lung, dragging himself across the gravel like that. I really have no idea what he thought he was going to accomplish."

In that moment, Mac wouldn't have held back. If he had been capable, he would have lunged up, like he had across that table so long ago, and he would have ended this. Whatever it took.

And like he had, so long ago, Murdoc laughed.

"Oh, MacGyver, if you could see your face . . ."

In his rage, he hadn't noticed, but Murdoc calmly retook his seat, and swiped the pad of his leatherclad thumb across Mac's left cheek. It came away glistening.

The assassin examined it a moment, then brought his gloved thumb to his tongue. His lips wrapped firmly around the digit, and he pulled it away unhurriedly, almost like a kiss.

Mac hoped it tasted like cyanide.

Murdoc's eyes rolled closed, and he exhaled, slowly. When they opened again they were unfocused, and there was chillingly little brown visible. ". . . there it is," he breathed.

He was furious with himself, with his body, with the situation. He had played right into Murdoc's hands and he fucking knew it. But no amount of chemical signals could overcome the paralytic, and Mac could do nothing but lay there, lounging in the chair, his breath hitching while Murdoc got everything he wanted. He intentionally stared at a bright patch of the concrete floor, hoping it would artificially narrow his pupils, and stop giving Murdoc something to gloat over.

To his relief, it didn't take the assassin long to recover, and Murdoc laced his fingers together and casually rested them on top of Mac's left arm, which was still draped over the armrest. "It took me a while. I had to do a . . . bit of testing." He bounced his hands on Mac's arm to reinforce the point. "I mean, you're so damn _selfless_. You would have even saved Drew if you could have. And yes, I know, you'd only do it so he could rot away in a cage, it's not like you'd let him go."

Even in his peripheral vision, Mac could see that Murdoc's smile fell, became something a little more sinister. "But what you _fear_ . . . it's not selfless at all."

For a moment, Mac dared to hope. That Murdoc had gotten it wrong. That there would be an out, an assumption he could leverage –

"You're afraid you're not enough," Murdoc told him, smile fixed in place. "You weren't enough to make mommy dearest stay with you. You weren't enough to keep your daddy's attention, or his love. You weren't enough to save your grandfather, your training officer, or even that adorable little graduate studentsicle."

He listened to the words, but they didn't make much sense. Of all the places Murdoc could go, that's where he ended up? Fear of abandonment? Fear of screwing up? That was -

Murdoc steepled his fingers together, and poked him in the ribs. "You're always there for your friends, MacGyver. You go to extraordinary lengths to encourage them, support them, protect them, and you do it all with a smile. You got yourself into one of the most prestigious universities in the country, you took the most dangerous job the Army could offer, then you graduated to nothing less than saving the world."

Murdoc's little smirk grew. "But under all this confidence, all this intelligence, all this bravado – you are nothing more than a frightened, insecure little tow-headed boy who craves their approval, who _needs_ their approval because you know that you. Aren't. Enough. And one day . . . all of those people you love, they're going to figure that out."

. . . that was insane.

 _Well, what did you expect? Actual wisdom?_

Somehow, Murdoc getting it wrong was –

Surprising? Disappointing, even? He should be relieved, but all he felt was confusion. And dread.

It didn't matter if Murdoc was right or wrong. He believed he was right, and he was going to make everyone important to him doubt him, doubt his ability to –

Keep them safe. Defend them. Protect them.

Murdoc was going to do exactly what he'd said he was. Target them, one by one. Use their fears to kill them. And he was going to do everything he could to make sure Mac couldn't save them. Even though he knew exactly what was going to happen, he wouldn't be able to stop it.

 _Which is nothing you didn't already know_ , Mac snapped at his mind. They'd been targets since they'd met Murdoc. The game was nothing new -

Except it was.

"Go ahead, Angus. Tell yourself I'm wrong. Tuck that away in your brain, the way you have since you were a child. Did you ever wonder why you were so very good at compartmentalizing your emotions? Did you ever wonder how you developed that skill? Why you _needed_ to?"

 _He's tryin' to crawl inside your head, dude, that's what he does_. It was Jack's voice, the warning loud and clear, and Mac could almost hear the traincar rattling beneath it.

Not that he'd ever hear Jack's voice again. The brick in his lungs shifted, grew a little heavier. Drew and Elliot had been right next to them for _hours_ , how could he not see what Drew was? What he was doing?

Murdoc pushed himself to his feet. "Oh, I'll give them a sporting chance, Angus. But you and I both know that you'll lose them long before they stop breathing. One by one, they'll see you for what you _aren't_. One by one they'll die, alone and terrified. And finally, one night, when you find yourself truly alone . . . that will be the night of your final exam. You're going to help me send a little message."

The assassin patted him on the knee, and Mac fought to keep his eyes fixed on the concrete.

"The next time we see each other . . . I think we're both going to have a lot of fun. Sweet dreams, MacGyver."

Murdoc smiled, and Mac couldn't help himself; he glared at him as strongly as he could, and he hoped his expressive fucking eyes conveyed _exactly_ what he thought about that pile of bullshit.

The assassin chuckled, then headed off into the shadows on the left, whistling a slow rendition of "Home On the Range," and the space echoed with it long after he was gone.

After that, it was quiet.

-M-

Please see the next chapter for A/N – this is intended to be a one-shot, and to be read all at once.


	2. Still Chapter 1

This is a direct continuation from the last chapter.

-M-

Mac didn't have many ways to keep track of time. He couldn't see his watch, and he could tell from the permanent chill in the back of his right hand that Murdoc's drugs were still dripping steadily into him. The stage lights prevented him from seeing any change of ambient light from outside the – it had to be a warehouse, or maybe a shipping depot. It was still too cold for crickets or other nocturnal insects to give him any auditory indications.

His chest continued to sting and itch in an unbearably consistent way, and his little friend was being quite still, wherever he'd settled in. Mac's inflamed chest ended up being his only method of distracting himself from a gradual but increasingly urgent need to urinate.

His only indication that time was truly passing was Drew.

The first time he looked, it was because the body settled. Drew's head had tipped back a little, but not enough to hide that his cheeks had puffed significantly. His left eye was still open, but the expanding toys in his mouth had pushed the skin up so that his eye appeared to be swelling shut.

Even at his distance, and with the deformities caused by the toy bugs, Drew's face was still a rictus of desperate terror.

The second time Mac looked, it was when cartilage popped and compressed without warning, when Drew's jaw finally dislocated.

Mac was fairly certain he fell asleep – or passed out - before another noise startled him, and he opened his eyes to see that the metal hook attaching the ball gag to its suede strap had failed, and the gag slithered down Drew's chest and rolled out under the right armrest of the chair, bouncing flatly onto the burner plate.

For some bizarre reason, Mac expected that to light it. He heard soft patters rather than the sharp clicks, and he brought his eyes up to see fifty cent piece-sized spiders slowly tumbling out of Drew's gaping, misshapen mouth and down his chest, into a soggy pile in his lap. Some of them were bloody.

The ones in his esophagus had nowhere to go, and they had grown and expanded his throat grotesquely, so that his neck was almost the same width as his head.

They no longer appeared to be toys, and Mac didn't look after that, no matter what sounds he heard.

Every time he thought about it, he tried to squeeze the armrests, or tried to close his mouth. The attempt and consequent failure became such a steady constant that when he was finally able to twitch a finger, he looked to the concrete between him and Drew's body, assuming he'd felt something because he was going to find a trail of hungry ticks, looking for a new source of blood.

He didn't; he was far enough away, and breathing lightly enough, that they hadn't detected him yet. He tried to move again, and the finger bent, ever so slightly.

After that, time seemed to stretch much longer.

Finger twitches gave way to uncoordinated arm and leg movement. He knew the process couldn't be worked out like shock, that it was chemical and biological and would happen as his body broke down the molecules blocking his receptors and eliminated them, which was probably causing his increasing bladder discomfort. Because the adrenaline had had nowhere to go, his blood glucose levels were also probably through the roof, which would explain his growing thirst and sense of fatigue.

Mac honestly hadn't known he could feel fatigue without being able to use his muscles.

And even knowing that it was simply a matter of time, and no amount of twitching or experimenting was going to get his muscles working any faster, he still tried.

When he rolled his head back and realized he could see the ceiling of the warehouse, he knew that it was approaching dawn. His muscles were starting to manage sustained contractions, meaning he wasn't just flopping around like a dying fish, but able to hold weight for a few moments at a time. As soon as he could, Mac levered the chair forward, so he was finally sitting up straight, and he discovered his fine muscle control was still shit when it took him an insane amount of time to finally manipulate open his zipper.

He relieved himself on the floor, knowing that his kidneys were his best defense against whatever Murdoc had given him, and it was at least twenty minutes after that before he was able to pull the needle out of his hand. The bag was long since empty, it didn't matter, but it made him feel a little better.

It also gave him something to do with his hands. He knew if he touched his chest, he was going to scratch the skin right off his ribcage. The only reason he even let himself look was to find the tick. His skin was just as red as Drew's had once been, and Mac found the little parasite nestled into the nook of his armpit and chest. He didn't have the dexterity to cleanly pull it free and he didn't care. Once he laid his right arm across his chest and managed to get a couple finger around it he just pulled.

Figuring he'd left the head embedded in his skin, Mac held onto the barely inflated parasite, and when he was able, he dropped it into the pocket of his shirt.

Evidence. If they knew where Murdoc got the ticks, maybe they could trace it to a place he stayed, or an alias he used.

It was a longshot, but he had to find him, and find him fast.

His chest was on fire where he'd laid his arm across it, and as motor control returned he allowed himself to rub his shirt with the inside of his forearm, hoping that at least not using his fingernails would prevent infection. It brought blissful relief, but only momentarily, and each time the returning itching sensation was worse.

It was that that finally drove him to his feet. He swayed, reaching out for the armrest, but the chair was light, meant to be portable. He landed on the concrete, pulling the chair down on top of himself.

After that, he had to wait until he had the strength to actually pick himself up off the ground. It took longer than he would have liked.

The sun had broken the horizon by the time MacGyver managed to drunkenly get his feet under him. His core muscles were the worst offenders; normally he didn't have to even think about those, but his abdomen and back were just as weak as the rest of him, and he couldn't shift quickly enough or nimbly enough to keep his balance. He'd been right, there was an IV stand behind him, with a small, empty bag of something unlabeled, and Mac left it hanging where it was.

Murdoc was long gone, and the body was clearly meant to be a message. Messages were meant to be found, and read. Everything Murdoc had left, he had meant to leave.

The rolling cart ended up being a godsent. Mac clumsily shoved everything off of it and used it as a large and unwieldy walker, but it helped him stay upright. The building was definitely a storage warehouse and shipping depot, clearly defunct. It didn't look like anything inside had been touched in over a year. Drew and Elliot – and later Murdoc – had left a pretty obvious trail in the dust, and Mac half walked, half fell across the warehouse until he reached the partially open floor to ceiling double doors, and the chilly morning sun greeted him.

He was facing east.

Along the length of the warehouse had been an old parking lot, and a silver Toyota Camry, some early 2000 model, was parked innocently a few spaces from the main door. It was dusty, even if there was any traffic on the access road – and he'd heard nothing all night – he wouldn't have given it a second look.

Mac trundled his cart towards it, eyeing the car even as he approached. There was no pool of liquid beneath it indicating oil, fuel, or transmission fluid had been cut, but he couldn't bring himself to believe that Murdoc would simply leave him a working vehicle with which to escape.

The point was to make him feel helpless. To make him doubt himself. His ability to protect them.

His ability to protect himself.

Rendering his fine motor skills shit and then presenting him with an IED was just the kind of thing he'd expect from Murdoc. Particularly if his hunch that Murdoc had at least cooperated with the Ghost to wire his house was right. He knew his dexterity would return, but it would take hours, hours he could either be sitting here waiting, or looking for help.

Mac didn't see so much as a fingerprint on that car in the wrong place, but his gut was taut and unhappy, and he backed off.

Which left him the readily apparent tire tracks – more than one set, but of course Murdoc must have been following them in some kind of vehicle to have seen his capture and Jack's murder – down a mostly flat access road that eventually turned a corner.

And outside of knowing he was headed east, that was all Mac had to go on.

He shoved the cart in front of him when he had to, and once he got around the corner and found a fairly straight and relatively shallow decline he sat on the cart instead and guided it using heavy feet as his steering and brakes. He got into trouble a couple of times, enough that he veered off the road altogether and was stopped by undergrowth and uneven terrain, but the speed boost was worth the bumps and scratches. His chest burned, not just from the irritant and the slice Murdoc had cut out of it, but from the inside. From the puke he'd aspirated, as well as his inability to breathe deeply afterwards. It set him to coughing whenever he exerted himself. It was the dry, tickling kind, not a problem yet.

As long as he was within a couple days' walk of civilization. And since he'd only been out for fifty minutes, unless they'd driven sixty or more almost the entire time, his odds of being that isolated were pretty low.

As long as he'd picked the right direction once he'd found the main road.

MacGyver was more relieved than he could say when staggering up the next little hill yielded a lone Texaco station, the sign brightly lit.

Twenty or so minutes later Mac abandoned his cart slash walker and stumbled up to the glass door, taking a moment to determine if it was the push or pull kind. He caught a glimpse of himself in the reflection.

His shirt was still half unbuttoned, but blood had glued the left side of it to his chest in a very horror movie-esque stain. The irritated skin was bright red, making his face look pale in comparison, and he'd noticed earlier that blood had dripped down his right hand and trailed down the inside of his middle finger when he'd pulled the needle.

So he could expect to draw attention.

Finally determining the door swung both ways, Mac pushed it open and used it to walk into the convenience mart, as steadily as he could.

The place was utterly empty save the attendant. Mac estimated that it was a little after seven am, but apparently this Texaco didn't get much traffic on Sunday mornings, and an overweight fellow in his mid thirties was stocking donuts into a glass case that didn't look like it had had a good cleaning for at least a year.

The guy turned around when the door tripped the electronic chime, and then he froze, tongs hanging in the air in front of him, still holding a glazed donut.

Mac swallowed, and tried to pitch his voice to be friendly.

"Phone."

He was relatively proud of how the word came out, considering he hadn't even tried to speak since last night, and the attendant started at him, blankly. The tongs slowly started to dip, like the weight of the donut was too much.

Vaguely annoyed, Mac gave up and simply stumbled towards the cash register.

". . . hey . . . uh . . ."

Mac catalogued and dismissed him immediately. Unsure, quiet tone, no attempt to move towards him. Not a threat.

He almost tripped over a wire rack shelf of chips, but successfully caught himself on the counter, and he reached across a thick plastic display of lottery and scratch-off tickets to pick up a cordless phone, sitting beside an ashtray with a couple cigarette butts and a half-spent pack of Camels. Despite his movements and fatigue, his mind was still more than capable, and Mac painstakingly mashed his thumb over the correct numbers. He felt like he was trying to dial a phone using a twizzler.

Mac picked up the phone, which seemed unusually slippery, but he was able to get it on his shoulder, and his neck was still so relaxed that he basically just laid his head down on top of it and was able to wedge it in firmly enough.

He probably looked like a zombie. Bloodied, shambling around, strangely flexible, barely able to speak –

The conversation he'd had with Jack, not twelve hours ago, stabbed him in the gut, and when he heard another voice on the line, it took him a second to find enough air to speak.

"If this isn't Mac I don't have time for you right now."

Mac swallowed – very difficult from his position. "M'addy."

She didn't sweat the lack of T's. "Blondie, thank god. Where are you?"

It was a landline. She could damn well trace it, because honestly, he didn't know, and looking around would make him drop the phone. "Gas'stashun. M'fine. 'Lone."

"Alright, we'll figure it out. I'm sending tac to you. You okay? You with me?" Her suddenly patient, less strident tone told him she already knew he wasn't, and hadn't bought his sad slur of an attempt at fine.

She'd been expecting the call. She knew that something was wrong.

Of course she did. When he and Jack didn't show up at home last night, Bozer would have gotten immediately worried. He could have reached out to the office, or to Riley, trying to find their phones, and when they couldn't –

And frankly, there was only one other thing she absolutely needed to know. "M'rdoc."

Because she clearly knew the other important thing – she knew Jack wasn't with him, or she would have asked.

Which meant they'd already found Jack.

Somehow, that made him feel just a tiny bit better. Jack wasn't lying on the shoulder of Linbar Drive, scaring church-goers and attracting carrion birds. He was with them.

Jack was already home.

"Okay, Mac. Okay. We're coming to get you. You stay put, you hear me? You stay put, and you stay awake."

Falling asleep was not a problem. Falling on the floor, a little more so.

"Yeah."

Relevant information conveyed, and not in the mood to try to answer twenty questions with a plank of wood for a tongue, Mac left the line open and let the phone slither down his arm to clatter back onto the counter. Then he walked in as straight a line as he could back towards the door. The attendant was right where he'd left him, tongs still in hand, but the donut had bought it at some point during the phone conversation and lay forgotten on the floor.

It reminded him how thirsty he was.

Mac's eyes dragged by a refrigerated case on the way back towards the door, and he stopped, using it as a halfway point to steady himself before clumsily pulling it open and managing to wrap a hand around a bottle of water. He probably still had his wallet, but he wasn't about to go fishing for it, and he certainly couldn't extract any bills out of it, so Mac simply kept walking, and let himself out.

He stumbled along the wall of the storefront until he made it past the glass to the bricks. Then he sat down as smoothly as he was able, not wanting to jostle his shirt and set his chest on fire again, and Mac closed his eyes against the morning sun.

Then he set about trying to open the bottle of water.

After about ten minutes he was almost frustrated enough to cry. He just didn't have the strength to hang onto the cap enough to twist it free, not even with his teeth. In the end, he managed to jam a hand into his pocket, pulling his swiss army knife loose, and he somehow managed to free up a blade.

Then he simply stabbed the neck of the bottle. It looked a little weird, but it got the water out, and it took every bit of his remaining self control to drink the water slowly enough that he didn't overwhelm his sluggish esophagus and drown himself.

The five hundred milliliters did little to quench his thirst. Definitely hyperglycemic.

After that, he just waited.

It wasn't more than twenty minutes later that two black SUVs popped over the far hill, and Mac let his head roll against the bricks, watching them approach. The attendant had never come out, and Mac found himself vaguely surprised that the county police hadn't arrived, sirens blaring. Maybe the guy had picked up the phone and Matty had explained the situation.

Or maybe Phoenix had just intercepted the call. Either way, he was glad to have avoided that complication.

The SUVs roared into the sandy parking lot, barely slowing to a reasonable speed before they got too close, and the first one pulled back around to face the street while the second angled itself between him and just about everything else. Mac pulled himself to his feet, a little surprised that it wasn't easier. The fatigue was getting worse, which didn't make much sense to him. He could not have used the muscles less over the past ten hours. Ignoring sky-high cortisol and histamine levels, his body should have thought it had a relaxing night's rest.

He'd hardly made it to standing before there was a steadying hand on his shoulder – his right shoulder. He recognized Mark Kyser, one of the Phoenix tac medics, and coming around the SUV was Grant Simmons. Both were wearing body armor and carrying sidearms, but it was less firepower than he'd expected, and Mac craned his neck to look at the other SUV, almost missing the fact that Kyser was speaking to him.

"-cGyver. Look at me."

Mac focused back on Kyser, who gave him an easygoing grin. "There you are. Let's get you in the back, okay?"

The hand on his right arm tightened when he stumbled, but he managed to half fall, half sit in the SUV successfully, and Kyser seemed satisfied, helping him pull his other leg up before firmly shutting the door.

Simmons was back in the driver's seat immediately.

"-kage in hand, no sign of him." Mac saw the man's eyes briefly in the rear view mirror, and then Simmons twisted in his seat to face him.

"How you doin', Mac? You alright?" 

He nodded. Tac's standing orders had probably just been retrieval, but with Murdoc long gone, and the warehouse being only a few miles away, Mac didn't see any reason the rest of the tactical team shouldn't just secure the scene now. It wasn't like they needed to convoy back; Murdoc wasn't going to strike anytime soon.

This was Step Four. It was up to him to do all the heavy lifting. Make a plan to deal with his fear, and watch it all fall apart.

"Do you know where Murdoc went?"

Mac shook his head as the passenger door opened, and Kyser slid onto the bench seat beside him, with a medkit and a blanket. Mac ignored the medic as Kyser took his left hand and slipped a pulse meter onto one of his fingers, and he focused on Simmons.

"He'scon. Warehouse. Wes'. F'w miles."

The tac leader brought a finger up to his com. "Hey, we got any kinda warehouses or storage facilities west of here, within five miles?" Without missing a beat, the older man's eyes flicked right back to him. He was about Jack's age, similar military background, similar haircut. Just his presence, his no-nonsense attitude, was strangely calming.

"Can you tell me what happened?"

"That can wait, we need to get moving," Kyser cut in casually, before Mac could even form the words. "Crank the heat for me, wouldja?"

The medic gave Mac a quick grin, unfolding the blanket and winding it behind him. Mac was surprised to feel that it was heated, and Kyser pulled it down around his shoulders snugly.

"You're a little chilly, there, Mac. Let's get you warmed back up."

The second the heated blanket touched his chest, the inflamed skin responded like sunburn. Mac raised his arms before he thought, trying to shrug it off, and Kyser grabbed his hands. He was gentle, and he turned the right one over, bringing the blood on the back of it to Mac's attention. "Do you know what he gave you?"

It was going to be near impossible to say 'non-depolarizing neuromuscular blocking agent,' so Mac went for easy. "Paral'ic."

Kyser was watching him closely – watching his eyes, Mac realized. He was tired of people staring at them, and he let his slide past Kyser's, out the window towards the other SUV. It hadn't moved yet. Simmons had turned back towards the windshield and was talking into his com in a low voice.

Kyser tapped him on the forearm, trying to regain his attention. "A paralytic. A muscle paralytic?"

Mac nodded.

He caught onto the game very quickly. "Were you conscious when it was administered?" When he got a nod, the medic asked exactly the right next question, and Mac was suddenly, almost overwhelmingly grateful to the other man.

"Did your muscle seize up right before it took effect?"

Wordlessly, Mac shook his head. And that was the difference between a depolarizing and a non-depolarizing blocker. That would tell Kyser all he needed to know.

"And it's taking a while to wear off." It wasn't a question.

Mac nodded.

"Okay. That's good, and nothing to worry about. Just affects the skeletal muscles, you feel weak but you're gonna be fine."

Mac already knew that, but the reassurance was nice.

"I'm going to open up your shirt now, Mac, okay? This is going to sting a little."

It was going to sting _a lot_ , and Mac clumsily caught the medic's hands as he reached for the fabric.

" _No_."

Kyser didn't exactly back off, but he didn't wrestle with him – which was good, because Mac knew he would have lost. And honestly, he wasn't sure himself if there was anything Kyser was likely to have in a quick response medkit that would do anything for what he suspected was an urushiol derivative. It wasn't like he was going to have a bottle of Tecnu wash in there.

. . . unless he did . . .

"Okay, Mac. That can wait." He gestured at Mac's chest. "Did you get splashed with something, a chemical maybe?"

Urushiol was probably not a word the medic would recognize. Again, Mac defaulted simpler. "Pois'n s'mac."

The medic translated that pretty well. "Poison sumac?"

Mac shrugged eloquently.

"Okay, something like poison sumac. I'm guessing it's itching, then, and burning a little?"

" _Lot_." He couldn't emphasize that enough.

Kyer just nodded. "Okay. Anything else I should know about?"

Mac shook his head. They hyperglycemia would resolve itself in a few hours, now that his muscles were moving again. The water would help with that. And Kyser could clearly see the blood, and that there wasn't enough of it to worry about. Wasn't even deep enough to require stitches.

Simmons threw the SUV into gear. "Satellite has a lumber yard and shipping hub about three miles west of us. That sound like the place?"

Mac could see Simmons' eyes on him in the mirror, and he nodded.

"Site confirmed. Bravo, check it out, see if you can get a lead on that psycho. We're heading back to the Phoenix, ETA is forty." Through the windshield, Mac saw the other SUV pull out, in the direction he'd come, and then Simmons whipped them around the pumps and headed the other way.

Something about that bugged Mac; he was distracted when Kyser grabbed his left hand again. The pulse meter was slipped off, but the medic didn't let go, putting two fingers on his wrist instead and doing a manual check. Kyser's fingers felt hot, even through the latex exam gloves. Simmons had done what the medic had asked, blasting warm air from the front of the vehicle, and the heated blanket was set hot enough to burn.

Mac closed his eyes briefly, trying to set any thoughts of burning out of his mind. The other tac team was in for an unpleasant morning. He wondered what the scene would look like, to them. What they'd make of it. Two unidentified dead men, Drew they'd have to fingerprint to ID, his teeth were probably too damaged now for dental record matching. Once they opened up that suit –

He felt himself physically turn his head, avoiding the memory. If the burner plate hadn't blown when Drew had tested it, it was probably safe. He didn't remember smelling any propane, so there were no leaks -

Explosion.

The Camry.

Mac glanced back up at the rear view mirror, hoping to catch Simmons' attention. "Carb'm."

The man turned a little, his short hair curly and a much lighter brown than Jack's, but the mannerism was almost exactly the same. "You say something, Mac?"

"Carbon?" Kyser was watching him closely, and Mac shook his head and tried again.

"Car . . . bom."

The medic's eyebrows shot up. "Simmons, he said 'car bomb.'"

Their driver nodded. "Bravo, stay on your toes. Mac says there's a car rigged to blow. Stick to basic recon until you're sure there are no other surprises."

Even if he was wrong about that, better safe than sorry.

Kyser tapped him on the forearm again. "Look, Mac, we're going to have to get that chemical off you, and the sooner we do it the better. I know you're a little confused right now, that's because you're hypothermic. When the drug Murdoc gave you wears off, you're gonna start shivering, and that's going to make this a lot less pleasant. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"

Mac stared at him a moment, a little annoyed at the medic's patient tone. His slurring was because of the paralytic, not cold. And he wasn't confused, his brain was -

And then all the pieces clicked.

Hypothermia caused mood swings, fatigue, slurred speech, confusion, and lack of coordination. And _of course_ he was hypothermic. Ambient temperature last night was around fifty-five degrees. He was running around in jeans and a button up shirt that was only half buttoned. Because of the paralytic, he didn't currently have the capacity to shiver, and his muscles had spent the entire night failing to generate much, if any, heat. His chest was occupying all his attention, the rest of him was probably numb from cold at this point, and he hadn't even noticed.

In fact, if Murdoc hadn't covered the lower half of him with a throw blanket, he probably would have –

And he'd sat outside the gas station for more than a half hour, and poured ice water down his throat.

A little more alert, and feeling more than a little stupid, Mac nodded.

Kyser watched him, apparently making sure before he wrapped a package of wet wipes in the corner of Mac's blanket. "Let's let these warm up a few minutes. While we're doing that, I'm going to clean up your right hand and your face, okay?" Without bothering to wait for a response, he took Mac's right hand, which had been heading for his chest, and redirected it to his knee.

"Simmons, reroute us to LA General." It was the same calm, conversational tone, and Mac saw Simmons' eyes in the mirror again.

"Anything I need to call ahead?"

Mac had the same question. He was still conscious; the hypothermia would be almost resolved by the time they hit Phoenix medical and it clearly wasn't life-threatening.

Kyser didn't dumb it down for Simmons like he'd been doing with Mac, swiping an alcohol pad quickly across the back of his right hand. "The neuromuscular blocker Murdoc hit him with is intended to be administered over an hour, not an evening. It's what you give electroshock therapy patients to prevent them from seizing. There are several drugs that can counter the effects pretty rapidly, and we don't stock them."

Mac barely felt the sting of the alcohol, and he gave the medic a look when Kyser produced a bandaid from his kit. Like that was even necessary at this point.

"Got it. Think they'll keep him overnight?"

The medic gave him another measuring look. "No, but I'm pretty sure he'll stay there anyway." Then he reached up with another wipe for Mac's face.

MacGyver pulled away a little, but Kyser was gentle, and Mac wasn't in the mood to argue with him. Inpatient or not, as soon as he could move without looking like an extra from the Walking Dead, he knew exactly where he was headed.

The wipe in the medic's hand came away from his face stained with red, but there wasn't any pain, and Mac tried to remember if Murdoc had hit him. When he finally realized what it was, it almost felt like he had.

That wasn't his blood.

It was Elliot's.

Mac closed his eyes, and barely heard Grant's voice floating back from the front seat. "This is Simmons. We're rerouting to General, non emergency. Go ahead and get a room prepped on the same floor we secured for Dalton."

His eyes snapped back open.

Kyser was fishing the wipes he'd been warming from underneath the blanket, as if Simmons hadn't just said something extraordinary, and he busied himself with ripping open the packet.

Mac leaned forward, making his voice loud enough to carry to the front. ". . . Jack?"

You didn't secure floors for corpses.

Kyser glanced up, then did a double take. "Oh, jesus – yeah, Mac. I didn't realize – Jack was shot. He got out of surgery earlier this morning. Came through with flying colors."

Surgery. Came through.

Jack was alive.

"He hasn't regained consciousness yet, so he couldn't tell us what happened. We should have told you sooner, I didn't think –" He broke off, his expression moving from guilty to concerned in a blink.

Mac sank back against the joint of the seat and the door, no longer listening. Jack was alive. They'd gotten to him in time. Gotten him to a hospital.

Jack was alive.

"MacGyver, you still with me?"

He felt himself nod, and for the first time since all this had begun, Mac thought he might actually throw up with relief.

"Come on, Mac. You didn't really think that stubborn son of a bitch checked out on you, didja?" Mark's eyes crinkled in a broad smile. "He'll be up and around in no time. And if you expect to be able to keep up with him, I gotta get this stuff off of you." The smile turned into something a little more serious. "You stop me if it gets too bad, okay?"

The medic slipped the blanket up off his shoulders, and Mac was honestly surprised to find that as soon as the too-hot thing was gone, he missed it. Mac went for the buttons before he realized that was never going to happen, so he let Kyser do the honors, very carefully not watching his gloved fingers at work. He slipped the right side off first, letting Mac shake his arm out of the sleeve, and then Mac remembered, and caught Kyser before he could do anything with the left.

The medic blinked at him. "Ah – itches, I bet. Okay, let's just give that a second –"

Mac shook his head, and he clumsily indicated the pocket on the left side of his shirt. "Tick."

Kyser tried to interpret that, and Mac frowned – or thought he did – and patted it. It was just over the cut, and rather than let the medic peel it off torturously carefully, Mac slipped his thumb into the pocket and pulled.

"Whoa-"

He got it unstuck a little more easily than he'd expected, but the stinging hit him a beat later, and it felt worse than the original slicing of his flesh had. Mac held his breath through the worst of it. Kyser took advantage of that, wiping him down starting with his neck, and Mac concentrated on the feeling of his shirt in his hand, making sure the medic didn't take it until he understood.

The tick. It was evidence. And as soon as he saw it, he'd know what to do.

Kyser was firm and efficient, and the blissful relief of having his skin gently rubbed was once again followed by an intense itch. Once Kyser was happy with the cleaning job, he pulled a white tube of some kind of cream from the kit, and applied it liberally everywhere but the cut. It didn't make the skin numb, not by a longshot, but it definitely helped.

"You can give me the shirt, Mac –"

Mac opened his eyes, not quite sure when he'd closed them. The blanket had been pulled back up over his shoulders in the meantime, and Kyser was trying to get the shirt away from him.

"Pogit."

Kyser nodded, showing he understood, and Mac let him have it. The medic felt the fabric of the pocket, looking a little confused, but then he dug around in it like he meant it, and he came back up with the body of the tick. He turned to the window, holding it up in the sunlight.

"This little guy bite you?"

Mac nodded.

"What'd you say?"

Kyser fished a small plastic sample container out of the kit, and raised his voice to answer Simmons. "Mac had a dead tick in his pocket. Thinks it's important."

"Did you say tick?" Though his voice didn't significantly shift, Mac heard it, and realized that Bravo team had found Drew. They'd been talking in Simmons' ear, this whole time.

And clearly not in Kyser's.

". . . yeah . . . ?"

"Bag that."

A little smile played on the medic's face. "Good idea," he murmured, and gave Mac a conspiratory wink.

Patching up the slice was a simple matter of a couple butterfly bandages; Mac held up a firm hand when the medic came at him with gauze and tape. It was just barely seeping, and rather than wrestling himself into a shirt he'd just have to take off again as soon as he got to the hospital, Mac grabbed the edges of the blanket and pulled it tightly around himself. Kyser could just let that be good enough.

The cream cut the burning and itching to something almost bearable, and Mac let the heat from the blanket and Simmons' driving lull him into a kind of trance.

The tac team was fine. No one had blown up. Jack was alive.

He was surprised when Kyser tapped him on the forearm again, and he opened his eyes to see that they were parked under the Admissions overhang. He nodded, to show that he was awake, and by the time he'd shifted in the seat and gotten the door open, someone in scrubs had approached with a wheelchair. Kyser relieved the man of it, and Mac was pleased to discover that it was easier to get out of the SUV than it had been to get in. He was still fatigued, but his body was responding a little better.

He wasn't happy about the wheelchair, but he understood that it wasn't worth fighting the medic over. He took the heated blanket with him.

Simmons and Kyser never let him out of their sight. It was exactly what Jack would have done, but Jack was Jack, and it was a little disconcerting to have two men, still in SWAT gear, guarding him from nothing. He felt strangely self-conscious, particularly as the doctors and nurses confirmed what Kyser himself already knew.

He was fine. He was still cold, his core temp a hair under ninety-seven degrees, and to make matters worse they'd stripped him down to the usual hospital gown, but warmed saline had been prescribed even before they realized he was hyperglycemic. Besides a skin scrape to ID the irritant, and a tox screen to confirm the drug that had been used, he overheard Kyser request tests for hep B and C, even though it was probably too early to detect it. Simmons must have filled him in on what the tac team had found, but neither man said anything to him about it.

The site where the tick had bitten him had been examined, and the head of the tick removed. Some well-meaning nurse with a stethoscope had detected the fluid building in his lungs, and he was pretty sure a dose of antibiotics had run through the IV at some point. A little medical adhesive had replaced the butterfly bandages on his chest, and while it still itched, a spray had been added over the numbing cream, and it was a least a thousand times better. He'd almost drifted off when a nurse added a small, clear bag to his IV stand, and that was about the time Matty finally appeared. She approached from the opposite side of the bed, giving him a relieved smile. She looked tired.

"Hey Blondie."

Mac nodded, still not trusting his tongue. He was practically mummified under piles of warmed blankets, and outside of his right arm, which was exposed so the nurses had access to the catheter in his elbow, the rest of him was inaccessible. She settled for patting him on the leg.

"You really should look into that loyalty card. You've blown through your deductible and it's only March."

He gave her a little smile, because he knew she expected it.

"The debrief can wait until later, but I need to ask you – those two men in the warehouse. Are they the men who attacked you and Jack?"

He nodded.

"Were they working for Murdoc?"

That was a little harder to answer, but Mac settled for shaking his head.

She correctly interpreted his reluctance. "But they were affiliated to him somehow."

Mac nodded. "Collektiv."

Fine motor control was still hours away, though Mac was hopeful the little bag was the drug Kyser had mentioned on the drive, and he could expect to make much faster progress.

Matty absorbed that. "So Murdoc killed them because they betrayed him."

Mac nodded. That was close enough for now.

"Okay." She rubbed his leg through the blankets. "Get some rest. They'll be moving you to the fourth floor. Bozer and Riley are up there right now with Jack. You can expect some company as soon as the doctors here are done with you."

Mac nodded, more to show that he understood than that he agreed, and then she was gone. That the Phoenix hadn't managed to identify Elliot and Drew yet vaguely surprised him.

And worried him. How many more of the Collective were like Henry Fletcher, and completely off their radar?

How was he supposed to keep them away from Riley, from Bozer, from Matty, if he didn't even know who they were.

And Jack . . . he had no doubt Murdoc would be absolutely _thrilled_ with this turn of events. He'd get his wish, to try to kill them together. Jack was probably the safest one of them, at least for now. Murdoc wouldn't go after him until last.

True to Matty's word, Mac was held in the ED for observation for another half-hour, and when his temperature had climbed another half degree, he was moved upstairs. He'd been given a room, meaning he had been admitted as an inpatient, but Mac didn't really care.

Kyser was quite right – he wasn't leaving the hospital tonight, even if he was discharged.

He'd been labeled a fall risk, literally – he was wearing a bright red band to go with his hospital bracelet – and it took a little bit of convincing to get the nurse to let him up to pee. He planned to make his escape as soon as she was gone, or distracted, but thankfully Kyser chased her off by promising to keep an eye on him.

When Mac exited the bathroom, dragging his IV stand with him, he was surprised to see the medic had acquired a wheelchair, and even pre-padded it with some of his blankets.

The other man smiled. "Look, we all know where you're headed, Mac. If you're sure you're up for it, just humor me and do it my way, okay?"

If you're sure you're up for it.

That wasn't the right question. He didn't want the attention, that was true. He wanted to think – needed to think. He had no way of knowing how much time Murdoc was going to give him before he started. There were a few things that needed to be done right now, before Jack left the hospital, basic defenses to set up. Bozer and Riley's concern, their questions, that was going to distract him, slow him down.

But his discomfort didn't matter. He _needed_ to be there when Jack woke up. It was non-negotiable.

Him being carted off was the last thing his partner had seen. Sitting beside him, alive and well, that needed to be one of the first things Jack saw next.

Mac nodded his thanks, and sat gingerly in the chair. Kyser threw another blanket over him, like a cloak, and Mac hung onto the IV stand as they made their way out the door and down the hall.

Mac recognized Shane Brown, another Phoenix tac member, in plainclothes at the end of the hall, idly scrolling through his phone. Mac was sure if he turned he'd see another one of Jack's friends securing the other end of the hall. Matty wasn't taking any chances, and she was probably turning away volunteers.

It didn't chase away the cold pit in his stomach, but it eased it a little. There were a lot of people watching out for Jack, for Riley and Bozer and Matty.

And him. They weren't alone, and he had every resource at the Phoenix's disposal to try to find Murdoc before he could make his move.

But he couldn't shake the feeling that it wasn't enough.

Jack's door was closed, which was no surprise, and Mac released his IV stand to lean forward and press the lever. It swung quietly open, revealing a sunlit room. Riley was the first one to spot him, pulling her feet off the bedrail, and then Kyser got him all the way in, and Mac watched Bozer, on Jack's other side, hastily popping out of the hospital recliner.

"Hey, there he is," Riley murmured in greeting, giving him a big grin.

Bozer was less reserved. "Mac!"

Being in the wheelchair was too close to being in the lounger, he didn't like how helpless it made him feel, and MacGyver kicked up the footrests and stood, intending to take the third chair in the room. Bozer didn't give him a chance; it looked like he was about to swoop in for a hug, but he held himself back at the last moment and settled for clasping hands, eyeing Mac's blanketed chest.

Clearly he and Riley had been kept in the loop.

"Man, it's good to see you." Relief made his voice thick. "When we got the call that Jack was in the hospital, I thought – and then Matty said-" He stopped himself, then shook it off, and gestured at the recliner he'd just abandoned. "C'mere, siddown before you fall down."

Mac started to shake his head, but Bozer put an arm around him and firmly steered, and he was in the recliner and bundled back up before he really knew what happened.

Which left him sitting right next to his partner.

Jack looked . . . about as good as he ever looked in a hospital bed. Not as pale as Mac had feared. He was on a ventilator, which Mac had expected. His IV tree was a little busier than Mac's, at least four bags of various sizes and colors hung there. One of them was clearly some kind of blood product, and the smears of it on the plastic were a little too much like the trails the toy spiders had left down the Tyvek. Mac averted his eyes.

"He looks way better than he did when they first brought him in," Riley assured him, from across the bed. "Doc said he'll wake up sometime in the next few hours, but he's gonna be a little loopy."

"Yeah, just make sure he doesn't try to take out that tube," Kyser cautioned them, dully, like it was a reminder that he'd already repeated a hundred times. "He really hates ventilators. Or anything else that enforces a no talking rule."

Bozer snorted – loudly - and Mac smiled.

Kyser wasn't wrong.

"I'll go see if I can scrounge up some lunch. Sandwiches good with everyone?"

He got a round of nods, and Mark backed the wheelchair into the far corner of the room, out of the way, and came back to the bed. He didn't say anything, eyes on the monitors over Jack's head, and then he dropped a hand to Jack's covered feet, and squeezed one, watching his stats.

Nothing happened.

"Give him another hour. Guess he needs his beauty sleep."

"You guess?" Bozer gave him an incredulous look. "You not wearin' your contacts today or somethin'?"

Kyser grinned and stepped back, giving Bozer a friendly pat on the shoulder as he left, and it wasn't long before the door closed behind him, and the room settled into a curious silence, punctuated with the rhythmic hissing and clicking of the ventilator.

It wasn't the first or even the second time Mac had sat in a hospital room with Jack and listened to that sound. It should have been welcome, proof of life, even soothing with its rhythms and valves, all working in perfect clockwork order.

Mac hated it.

Jack needed that machine to breathe. Because a professional assassin had shot him and left him to die.

And all the reasons Drew might not have taken that second shot, the kill shot, swirled around his head. Didn't want to waste the ammunition. Or maybe Murdoc had talked Jack up, even though he never wasted an opportunity to tear him down to his face. Maybe taking down an operator like Dalton was a notch on Drew's belt, and he wanted to rub it in, make him suffer. Maybe they'd really actually connected over that zombie conversation, and Drew wanted to give him a fighting chance.

But he hadn't had one. The odds were so incredibly stacked against him –

Mac looked across the bed, towards Riley, and found she was watching him, even though her rig was in her lap and open. When he caught her, she gave him a sad little smile.

"I know you can't really talk right now, but I don't suppose Murdoc gave you any clues to where he might be going next?" Her voice was light, but Mac could hear the strain under it. "I'm getting pretty sick of this guy putting holes in you two."

Mac didn't think the truth – that it hadn't been Murdoc, for once – was going to make her feel any better. He'd left plenty of stuff in the warehouse, but knowing Murdoc, he'd meant to. Every single thing there might be a clue, might have been left to make a point, but Mac was pretty sure none of it would lead anywhere Murdoc didn't want it to.

Mac wordlessly shrugged. Then he thought better of it. "Who foun'Jack?"

She tilted her head a little. "Jill did, sort of. Someone spotted him on the road and dialed 911. We didn't know it at the time. Boze texted me when you two didn't show up at the house, had me ping your phones, but they were both off. We eventually found your jeep about ten miles away from where they, uh, they found Jack. As far as we could tell, you guys just disappeared."

"But Matty knew you wouldn't go down without a fight, so we started lookin' for police reports around the time you two left the Claim Jumper, gunshots, anything like that. Started lookin' at area hospitals for gunshot wounds and broken bones, too."

Go down without a fight. Bozer didn't realize that was exactly what they'd done.

"Only three patients came in with GSWs last night, and –" Bozer gestured to the bed. "He was already in surgery."

So he'd been saved by whoever had next driven by. If that person had been later, or chose not to take Linbar in the dark, hadn't been paying attention when they'd come around the curve –

Mac blinked. Actually, he knew _exactly_ who had driven around that curve after them.

He glanced back up at Riley, who was still watching him. "C'n we hear th'call?"

Her eyes shifted as she thought, then she nodded, and started typing. "Yeah, it came in around . . ." She trailed off, then put in an earbud, and he presumed she started screening the call log.

Bozer got tired of standing, and he grabbed the third chair, dragging it a little closer to Jack's bed. "And how're you doin'? Looks like Murdoc put you through the wringer. Are you okay?"

Mac knew what the correct answer was, and he knew Bozer wouldn't buy it any more than Matty had. Was he okay.

He was fine. He would be walking and talking, fully functional before nightfall. His chest would probably become a sheet of tiny blisters in the next twenty-four hours, but he was sure one of the injections had been a steroid, which would keep the inflammation down. The slice was shallow, it would heal without a scar.

No lasting damage. The textbook definition of fine.

And he would be fine when he walked into the house, and found Bozer lying there, waiting for him, wearing that face –

Mac swallowed, and discovered that he was now capable of shivering. He hiked the blanket up a little higher around his neck, and then he opened his mouth.

"Hey . . . guys . . ." Riley's voice came out instead of his. Her eyes were glued to the monitor, but she slowly tugged out the earbud. "You need to hear this."

The speakers were a little small, but Mac could hear well enough over the ventilator.

"9-1-1, is emergency assistance needed?"

There was a pop on the line. "Yes. I'm on Linbar Drive, about a mile east of the intersection of Linbar and Spence. I came around the corner, and there's a man lying in the road. I think he's been shot."

The caller was male, his voice calm.

"Sir, can you – sir? Sir, are you still on the line? Sir!"

The call ended.

Riley tapped a key, then looked up at them, eyes wide.

Beside him, Bozer shifted. "You're . . . no. That wasn't . . . was that –"

Mac nodded, not trusting his voice, and another round of shivers wormed up his spine. He'd heard the man talking not six hours ago.

It was Murdoc. Murdoc had made the 911 call that saved Jack's life.

Murdoc knew. The whole time, he knew Jack was still alive – or at least he knew there was a chance Jack had survived.

Riley just stared at them both in shock, and then turned to look at Jack. Like the sound of Murdoc's voice in the room might have woken him, registered on some subconscious level, and Jack was suddenly going to sit up and rip out the tube and suggest they go find the son of a bitch right now so he could say thank you personally.

But it didn't happen. Jack's eyes remained closed. The ventilator hissed, and his chest rose and fell.

"I'm . . . Matty needs to know." She traded the laptop for her mobile, texting furiously.

Bozer was still having trouble with complete sentences. "But . . . why? Why would he . . .?"

Mac closed his eyes, denying the unsteady little tremor in his next breath. He knew exactly why. Murdoc had told him why.

And Bozer noticed. Just like Murdoc had.

"Mac . . . hey . . . you okay?"

He opened his eyes almost automatically, a night's worth of reminding himself he couldn't close them coming back in a rush, and he looked at Jack for a second before his gaze skittered away, seeking more neutral ground.

". . . no."

He wasn't.

-M-

[crickets chirping]

The premise of this story was a question: how could Murdoc make MacGyver afraid of him? Not afraid of a scenario, not afraid of an action he could take – afraid of the man himself.

It wasn't until we saw Murdoc playing nice with MacGyver and Jack on the train in Murdoc + Handcuffs that I really picked up on what the writers had been laying down all that time. That the artistry for Murdoc was that his victims died terrified. Between the story about the legless spider reaching "peak terror" and Murdoc's spitballing about Mac and Jack strapped in "face to face, screaming in terror as they plunged to a beautiful fiery death" it really became clear that the art, for Murdoc, is making his victims afraid. (Possibly because he hates and fears being terrified himself, from his childhood, and can think of no worse state to die in, but that's neither here nor there.)

The reboot Murdoc is quite a bit darker than his old-school counterpart, and because this is a CBS show on during prime time, what Murdoc does to people is just inferred, or glossed over. I mentioned to Alyssa that with all the near-death scenarios the fanfic community puts Mac in, I was surprised we'd never seen Murdoc just swoop in, unceremoniously kill the bad guy de jour, and then ride off into the sunset, leaving a confused and horrified Mac strapped in to whatever death machine, just staring. Then it occurred to us that he wouldn't waste a perfectly good opportunity to really scare the pants off Mac.

And if he can also send a message to his fractured little collective, well, that's efficiency for you.


End file.
